NEW YORK — Historically, marriage was the surest route to financial security for women. Nowadays, it’s men who are increasingly getting the biggest economic boost from tying the knot, according to a new analysis of census data.
The changes, summarized in a Pew Research Center report being released today, reflect the proliferation of working wives over the past 40 years — a period in which American women outpaced men in both education and earnings growth.
A larger share of today’s men, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own.
“From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage,” wrote Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, the report’s authors.
One barometer is median household income, which rose 60 percent between 1970 and 2007 for married men, married women and unmarried women, but only 16 percent for unmarried men, according to the Pew data.
The report focused on U.S.-born men and women ages 30 to 44 — a stage when typical adults have finished their education, married and started careers. The Pew report noted that today’s Americans in this age group are the first in U.S. history to include more women than men with college degrees.
In 1970, according to the report, 28 percent of wives in this age range had husbands who were better-educated than they were, outnumbering the 20 percent whose husbands had less education. By 2007, these patterns had reversed — 19 percent of wives had husbands with more education, compared with 28 percent whose husbands had less education.
In the remaining couples, about half in 1970 and 2007, spouses had similar education levels.
Only 4 percent of husbands had wives who earned more than they did in 1970, compared with 22 percent in 2007.
“The gains that women have made in earnings and education are a notable reflection of a range of efforts to promote equal opportunities,” Cohn said. “But the earnings gap has not yet closed.”
The Pew researchers noted that the economic downturn is reinforcing the gender reversal trends, with men losing jobs more often than women.
Deborah Siegel, a New York City writer, said she is living through some of the Pew report’s trends as she returns to work three months after having twins while her husband — laid off from his corporate-branding job a year ago — helps out with child care amid occasional freelance work.
“For men, being laid off is such a huge ego blow,” said Siegel, author of “Sisterhood Interrupted.” “The recession may be ending, but we’re still working out our dynamics.”
Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who writes often about marriage, said she has been struck by the dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs that in the past had enabled men without a college education to earn high enough wages to raise a family.
The loss of those jobs, Coontz said, “is something no feminist would take pleasure in.”
Yet, she said the trend also reflects that many husbands no longer feel compelled to be the sole breadwinner and are embracing a bigger share of housework and child-raising.
“If it weren’t for the gains of the women’s movement, which have produced a steady equalization of women’s wages and new incentives for women to get more education . . ., most families would have stagnated in their living standards even before the recession,” Coontz said.
