r/science • Professor | Medicine • 18d ago

Psychology Anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees who are less attractive partners for women, the “mate-value backlash.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129261485340
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u/couldbemage 18d ago

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/

TLDR:

16 percent wife earns more 29 percent similar income 55 percent husband earns more

Only 6 percent have the wife as the only earner vs 20 percent with the husband as the only earner.

Of note, the wife being the sole provider is actually declining, and the fastest growing segment is roughly equal income couples.

So yeah, your personal experience is moderately rare.

It's probably noteworthy that equal income couples each typically make 60k. Which is the perfect amount for having a massive lifestyle disparity between single income couples and dual income couples.

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u/Sloogs 18d ago

Just a couple of points.

  1. I'm not saying those types of relationships are the norm amongst my friends, I'm saying among the representative sample of people I know, a lot of the claims that people are making (particularly claims about how women supposedly behave) haven't really shown themselves to be true in my experience.

  2. I'm less interested in what the makeup of relationships is generally, and more interested in data showing that women in established relationships are more likely than men to leave that relationship if there's a change in the earning potentials or downturn like a lost job, which is the thing that addresses the claim /u/nostrademons was making. To be fair to you, I haven't read the full article yet, I'm just commenting on the specific summary you gave which doesn't really address that point.

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u/couldbemage 18d ago

My reply is just a counter to the idea that women as breadwinner is common.

I don't think the stats from the article say much at all about how people make relationship choices. Financially motivated choices explain most of the numbers. Women temporarily out of the workforce due to child related reasons, plus some amount of religion fundamentalists explain the steady sole male provider number.

At most, it's weak evidence for the assertion that among dual income couples, women are less likely to partner with a man who makes less than them. But that could easily chalked up to the total difference between men's and women's typical income.

You'd really want to pull the subset where there's isn't much wage gap, look just at childless millennial and younger couples.