I recently came across this article. I included the link only in case you think I'm just making shit up. I'm not. Someone actually wrote this.
The name of the article tells you all you really need to know: "When mom earns more, it's tough on dad."
And in deference to Dr. Drexler, you need to know the conclusion as well, which states, essentially, that dads who feel threatened by these changing gender roles need to get over themselves, and accept the idea that moms can be the primary breadwinners, dads can be primary caregivers, and families need to move beyond the social gender stereotypes that we've been locked in for most of the past century.
I happen to agree with that part.
What I do not agree with is that dads who earn less, and/or have a lower level of formal education, can't handle being in a role that they perceive as inferior. I'm sure there are plenty of those dads out there (I've written about them before), but if this is a continuing or growing trend, then we, as a society, need to give back all the nice things that we've accomplished and slink back into the caves. Neanderthals don't get iphones.
So, what's really going on here?
Well, either I'm wrong (on the whole, unlikely), the cited studies are deeply flawed, or the author of the article interpolated the wrong conclusions from the data sets she was looking at.
So, I decided to look at the studies, or at least what I could find of them online without having pay anyone any money.
The results were quite surprising.
(Except about me not being wrong. That wasn't surprising.)
The article referenced three specific studies, one by the good folks at Pew, and 2 academic studies which I was only able to find abstracts of.
The Pew study showed that more and more women have higher levels of education and earn more than their spouses, and also showed that both men and women claim that they don't think it matters which spouse earns more. Yet the study still shows the general social attitudes still prevail, with more people believing that the woman should be the primary caregiver, and that having a successful marriage and family life is more difficult when mom works.
But, if you read the rest of the study, it becomes clear that, despite having some ways to go, this represents a significant shift in attitude versus just a decade ago, and that these trends have been moving in the direction of more equal co-parenting between spouses since at least the 1960s.
So is this an historical trend that is going to continue to harm the fabric of our society by making dads feel inferior to the point that they have serious commitment issues within their relationships, or even physiological problems that require medication to maintain a normal lifestyle?
Well, a second study cited indicates that men who earn less than women are 10% more likely to be on some kind of medication for such physiological issues...
...In Denmark.
Does that matter? Is there a difference between social and gender roles in U.S. and Denmark? I don't know, but given that the U.S. is one of the most heavily medicated societies in the world, I think it is telling that the study about the difference in medication in men based on household income was done in Denmark.
Context is everything, and I don't believe that social context was fully taken into account or explained in this case. Rather, it seems as though results were found which seemed to coincide with the authors thesis, and so were shoehorned in.
This is really easy to do. I did it with that prescription drug report I linked to in the last paragraph. I wrote the conclusion, then found an article on the web to back to up. When you start from a preconceived conclusion, making the data fit your argument usually isn't too hard.
The third cited study noted that men who earn less are more likely to cheat on their spouses.
Well, you say, that can't be good. Is this data somehow flawed?
No, the data on this is pretty solid, but what is portrayed in the article once again only tells half the story. The full study shows that men who cheat either earn less than their spouse, or more. In other words, the men in the study cheat, and it may or may not have anything to do with their relative income. The author of the study then goes on to claim that men who make less feel threatened, and therefore cheat on their spouse. And men who earn more cheat on their spouse because, you know, their guys and they can get away with it.
So, guys who earn less are threatened, and guys who earn more are on a power trip. To be clear, the data supports this hypothesis only as far as that hypothesis fits the data. The data itself does not identify that actual reasons that the men in the study cheated. So, the conclusions, which are full of terms like "threatened" and "feelings of power," seem to be more the author's rationalizations of the data based on his own preconceived notions about social gender roles than on any hard data.
Overall, it kind of sounds like they just studied jerks of different income
levels. A poor jerk and a rich jerk are, in turns out, still jerks.
Now, to be sure, these are very smart people writing carefully researched articles that are meant to shine some light on gender roles in our society, and in particular family dynamics and the shifting roles of breadwinners and caregivers, and help us understand how those roles will impact the next generation, which is growing up right before our eyes. But as soon as we fall back on our preconceived notions of male and female roles, we are undermining our own progress.
Because when we do that, the headline changes from "Families Are Succesfully Beginning to Shift Away From Decades Old Institutionalized Sexism," to "Dads Have It Tough."
And I call bullshit on that.
If you, as a dad, feel you have it tough in this new and emerging social gender paradigm, tough shit.
Because being a successful parent is tough. Also, having a fulfilling career. Also, having a successful marriage. I'm sorry, you wanted "easy" social roles? Sorry, buddy, you've been watching too much "Mad Men."
Parenting, career, and marriage, if plotted out, all fall along the same data curve: the more challenged you are, the more effort you put into it, the more fulfillment you receive from it. So yes, I agree, being a working parent is challenging. Making a marriage and a family work when both spouses have careers that they also find challenging and fulfilling, that's Difficulty Level: Expert.
Which is kind of what makes it so worthwhile.
It may sound like I'm being defensive here, and perhaps I am. But I have been waging a seemingly one-dad war against just the kind of social gender role stereotyping that these studies seem to be validating, and I'm convinced that we as a society not only can change, but need to change, and are changing even now. But these studies, lending "scientific" credibility (while simultaneously violating the scientific method through common fallacies like "correlation versus causation," and basing conclusions on subjective ideas rather than objective evidence), create an environment where guys are given a free pass to act like assholes. And you're better than that, guys.
Oddly, while reading up on the cited studies in the above article, I found a reference to another article in a journal called "Sex Roles" (Best name for an academic journal ever, by the way), which said, "macho men whose partners earn more than they do have worse romantic relationships, in part because the difference in income is a strain for them. Conversely, men who are not so traditional in their masculinity do not place as much importance on the difference in income and, as a result, appear to have better-quality relationships with their female partner."
Now that, I believe. But I don't think income has anything to do with it. That sentence should read: "Macho men have worse romantic relationships; men who are not so traditional in their masculinity have better-quality relationships with their female partner."
Ultimately, I find all this very hopeful for the future. And here's why:
Because if you're the kind of guy who is that insecure about his masculinity that you let your relative income affect your family relationships, than I would much rather you not have any hand in raising your children. Because you're going to raise them wrong. And you're only going to further perpetuate the same gender role stereotyping that is so ingrained in our thinking that even the researchers who are trying to understand the current state of gender roles in our society fall back on the same old and out-dated assumptions seemingly without questioning whether those assumptions are still valid, or if something new is actually starting to emerge.
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