The following is a round-up of news items compiled by the Hitched editors during the week of July 24, 2014.
Men With Stay-At-Home Wives View Working Women Unfavorably
Data gathered from five studies that included 993 married, heterosexual male participants found that guys who were in “traditional” marriages (the man worked while the wife stayed home and did not collect a paycheck—can this term be blown-up yet?) were more likely to deny qualified female employees opportunities for promotions, presumed that organizations with a high number of female employees operated less smoothly, and were less likely to take a job at companies with female board members. The study was done by a team of business school professors led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Sredhari Desai, with data for the five studies dating back to 1996. These old-thinking men are becoming more rare considering in 2012 the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that just 20% of marriages resembled the “traditional” marriage structure. What’s interesting is that the researchers found a man’s attitude could (and did) change depending on his marital status and structure. Meaning, if a single man grew up with a working mother, but later in life got married and was the sole breadwinner, his attitude was more likely to reflect that of other “traditional” married men. In a Bloomberg Businessweek article, Desai says, “I was fairly surprised to find such a strong correlation between the types of marriages men were in and the attitudes they hold at work. This is the USA in 2014! I really thought things would be different.”
As hinted, men’s attitudes were able to change. Men who married a woman who worked was more likely to accept his female co-workers. In another study, Desai tested her findings on 200 current male managers and asked them to recommend a fictional job applicant based only on the resume. Men in “traditional” marriages overwhelmingly chose resumes with male names on them, whereas men in two-income households favored their fictitious female applicants. In case you were wondering, the researchers found that having a daughter did not show any significant effect in candidate recommendation for men.
Size (of Wife’s Paycheck) Matters
Money magazine conducted a Love & Money survey covering a variety of issues on how money impacts marriages, from fighting to keeping secrets. Consistent with this week’s theme of women in the workplace, we’re going to highlight how money affects the sex lives of couples. Husband and wife teams where they both earn roughly the same amount of money reported they have the most sex (47% said they were intimate at least once per week). When the husband made more than the wife, they reported having sex at least once a month, but when the wife earned more it was less than once per month. Frequency doesn’t always mean satisfaction though, right? Well, financially egalitarian couples reported the highest satisfaction whereas couples with one earning more than the other were least satisfied. Households where the wives earn nothing were least content with their current sex lives, responding most to the survey questions with “could be better” or “what sex life?” What might surprise some is that regardless of who made more or how much, men were easier to please when it came to sex, but women who earned more than their husbands were least likely to report a satisfying sex life.
Steve Cooper is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hitched. You can follow him on Twitter at @hitchedmedia.
