The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family - Hardcover

Liza Mundy is the bestselling author of Michelle: A Biography and Everything Conceivable. A longtime award-winning reporter for The Washington Post, she is currently a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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The grown-up Hawkins siblings can’t tell you why it happened, or pinpoint when, exactly, they noticed the change in their family. Maybe somebody pointed it out at their annual Christmas gathering, or during one of the big reunions the Hawkins family holds every other summer. Or maybe there never was an aha moment. The knowledge just settled in until it became a fact they all knew, but hardly thought twice about. We have become a family of female earners.

Which was not how the siblings had been raised.

The siblings—there are six of them—grew up in the Detroit, Michigan, suburbs. Their mother, Marcelle Hawkins, had all six in less than six years, completing her childbearing by the time she was twenty-five and staying home to raise them. Their father, Gary, supported the family by working as an engineer for Ford. He didn’t graduate from college, because in the 1960s and 1970s a man working for the U.S. auto industry didn’t need to. During his career Gary Hawkins helped launch the Pinto, visited assembly plants and solved their problems, traveled to help open factories in other regions, and as his wife puts it, “had his hand raised” every time Ford needed an engineer to work overtime. His chief regret, in retirement, is how little he saw of the children as they grew.

In contrast to his father, the oldest Hawkins sibling, Danny, graduated from the University of Michigan and married a woman whose earning potential was as high as or higher than his was. Danny took a job in financial services but was reluctant to work the crushing overtime load his bosses expected, so in the mid-1990s he left to become the happy, fulfilled hands-on parent to their two daughters, a stay-at-home father before the term got trendy. According to his own mother, Danny runs a household every bit as well as she did. He shops and cooks with such exactitude that he rarely ends up with leftovers, maintains a budgeting system that involves placing portions of money in a box with sections designated for specific uses, keeps a color-coded family appointment calendar, and has a stair step for each member on which he places packages and other belongings. On Halloween, for fun, he tried doing a statistical analysis of trick-or-treaters to gauge how much candy to buy the following year but decided there were too many unpredictable variables. Over the years, Danny has served as treasurer of the PTA, treasurer of the music boosters, treasurer of the co-op preschool, treasurer of their homeowners association, and sympathizing treasurer of the golf club they belong to. In the evenings he is happy to listen to the workday accounts of his wife, Susan, a senior vice president with the Henry Ford Health System, with her challenges and sharing in her triumphs.

“I have told Susie several times that my job is to make her life easier,” says Danny. “And I like doing it.”

Meanwhile, Danny’s younger sister Leslie works in supply-chain management for a Michigan transportation and logistics company, where she has risen to be part of the top leadership team. Her own husband, Damon, who everybody thought would be a hotshot corporate lawyer and the main breadwinner in the family, instead stepped back to become the secondary earner, working as a real estate broker and becoming the on-call parent for their three children. Like his brother-in-law Danny, Damon cooks, ambitiously; golfs, formidably; drives children to lessons and sports games; cleans house; and is so comfortably domesticated that when some neighbors arrived for a card game and Damon answered the door holding a dust cloth, the neighborhood began calling him “Coco.” Damon, who is known for his humor, embraced the nickname and the reputation for housekeeping excellence that goes with it.

Another grown-up Hawkins sibling, Rhonda, had no idea what she wanted to do with her life when she was a young adult. In college, Rhonda changed majors so many times she stopped counting. Eventually she switched to night classes and took a job as a receptionist at Magna International, a company that supplies systems and components to the auto industry. She began working in marketing, got her degree in that field, and did so well that she finds herself—though she is too self-deprecating to allow that this is a big deal—the company’s head of global marketing. Her husband, Hank, works in the restaurant business and loves what he does, but scaled back his hours when Rhonda got a promotion that required her to take extensive overseas trips on short notice.

Another Hawkins sibling, Lori, who works in finance, is in a committed relationship with another woman; both contribute monetarily to the household.

The other Hawkins daughter, Shelly, is a divorced mother of two, supporting her own household with a job in the health-care field.

Out of the six adult children of Gary and Marcelle Hawkins, only one—Michael—is in a traditional marriage where he has filled the role of primary earner.

Six adult siblings. Five households supported by women. One generation. One complete economic flip.

It’s a profound change in the balance of economic power, a striking role reversal and one that was unplanned, barely noticed, in fact, sneaking up on the Hawkins family when nobody was looking. In a matter of decades, the traditional male breadwinner model has given way to one where women routinely support households and outearn the men they are married to, and nobody cares or thinks it’s odd. The Hawkins family—sane, functional, rooted in a midwestern state known for family values—offers a convincing vision of what America is becoming. We are entering an era where women, not men, will become the top earners in households. We are entering the era in which roles will flip, as resoundingly as they have done in this family. You laugh, but that Big Flip is just around the corner.

Not that long ago, in 1970, the percentage of U.S. wives who outearned their husbands was in the low single digits. Some of these women were super-achievers, but more often they were women married to men who were ailing, drifting, unsteady, or unemployable. For generations, female breadwinners were mostly poor women—women whose husbands had difficulty providing. Forty years later, this template has changed dramatically, as the forces that produce female breadwinners have become more powerful and varied. Almost 40 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands, a percentage that has risen steeply in this country and many others, as more women have entered the workforce and remained committed to it. Women occupy 51 percent of managerial and professional jobs in the United States, and they dominate nine of the ten U.S. job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade.

Part of this ascent is due to the gradual lifting of discriminatory practices that once funneled women into lower-paying sectors and obliged them to quit work when they got married. Part is due to long-term changes in the economy that have chipped away at male sectors like construction and manufacturing while bringing big increases in women’s fields such as education and health care. And a large part is due to women’s own grit and initiative, evidenced by the fact that women now outnumber men on college campuses in the United States as well as around the world. By the year 2050, demographers forecast, there will be 140 college-educated women in the United States for every 100 college-educated men. Globally, a generation of young women is entering the job market who are better educated than young men are, and poised to become the most financially powerful generation of women in history. In coming years, economists—who study major transitions such as the rise of agrarian society, the dawn of the industrial age, the ascent of the white-collar office worker, the opening of the global economy—will look back and see this as the era when women realized their earning power and, for the first time, outpaced their partners. “The trends are clear,” agrees Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago who pioneered the economic study of families, even predicting that “we could see a day where women, on average, are earning more than men.”

In addition to the changes it will bring to the economy and the workplace, the rise of women earners will shape human behavior by challenging some of the most primal and hardwired ways men and women see one another. It will alter how we mate, how and when we join together, how we procreate and raise children, and, to use the phrase of the founders, how we pursue happiness. It will reshape the landscape of the heart. This is a book about how men and women are changing all those things already, and how these changes will play out in the future.

Think the Hawkinses are an anomaly? A fluke? Consider Jessica Gasca, a resident of South Texas who works as a paralegal, supporting a husband and three children. Jessica likes being in the workforce. She prefers it to staying home. So her husband, Juan, watches the children and takes part-time jobs in customer service. “Our kids see me as the father,” says Jessica, who has several sisters who also are breadwinners in their households. These women, to their surprise, have emerged as dominant earners in their immigrant Hispanic community, a culture with strong patriarchal values yet one in which women are outstripping men even more rapidly than in the nation as a whole. For many, this creates profound discomfort. “My mom always says: ‘All my daughters—I’ve never taught you to be that way. I can’t believe it.’ She says that we’re providing for the man, when it should be the other way around.”

Or consider Alicia Simpson, a psychiatrist, and her sister, Tracy Parker, a banker. Both women are graduates of Howard University, an elite, historically black university in Washington, D.C., where nearly 70 percent of the student body is female. Alicia and Tracy, both in their forties, both mothers, grew up in a male-breadwinning family, and over dinner they tried to remember what they had expected starting out in their marriages, and to understand how it was that they ended up primary earners.

“I always figured it would be a partnership,” said Alicia. “Everybody sort of carrying his own weight.” For these sisters, the change was so disconcerting that their marriages foundered. Alicia divorced her husband—“I had to push him out of the nest; it was like, either you’re going to fly, or you’re going to perish”—while Tracy worked through her resentment and struggled to accept her role. “My husband’s a great dad and I need him there,” said Tracy. “So it was a mind-set that I had to develop.”

Consider Rita Radzilowski and her sister, Ginette Trottier, both raised in a working-class family, both college graduates. Ginette, a nurse, married a business analyst who underwent a stretch of unemployment in the recent recession, when his company was sold and many positions were pushed overseas. Around the same time, Rita, who has an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, and a master’s degree—among other credentials—dated a professional brickmason who also lost his job. Neither man graduated from a four-year college. Both face a changing economy where high-paying jobs for non-grads are on the decline. The sisters adjusted by setting their own sights even higher. Rita is preparing to embark on a doctorate and Ginette moved into management and began to consider medical school. It seems clear to Ginette that she may remain the top earner in her marriage—or at least the one with the more reliable paycheck—so she might as well maximize that income as a doctor rather than a nurse. “I want to do it,” she said. “I want to make more money. I might as well do it. I know it’s a lot of work. I understand.”

Or meet Jill Singer, raised on a farm on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho, with the expectation that she would work hard in life but should not expect to earn much for her labor, because earning money was a man’s domain. When she was growing up in the 1970s, Jill and her sisters were expected to do agricultural chores alongside their brothers. “By the time we were tall enough to push a lawn mower, that’s when we started working,” Jill remembers. “But we were also supposed to do inside chores. The boys could come inside and sit, but the girls were expected to do cooking and sewing and mend the shirts.” She was raised in the Mormon Church, which—like a number of traditional religions—teaches that the husband provides for, and presides over, the family. Growing up, Jill learned that public space belonged to men and private domestic space to women. “Men were responsible for the ‘outside’—income and discipline—and women were responsible for the ‘inside’—budgeting for a household, raising the children, staying home and making sure the husband is happy,” is how Jill summarizes her upbringing. “I was never led to expect that I would be a primary breadwinner. Ever.” Yet Jill now works in construction management and earns twice as much as her husband. Thumbtacked to a bulletin board in her mud room is the church’s proclamation on the family, which articulates the man-as-provider philosophy. She doesn’t pay much attention to it—believing that it has nothing to do with church doctrine, and everything to do with church politics—and expects any day now to be relieved of her duties as a Sunday school teacher, relating gospel principles to children on the verge of being baptized. She tells her daughters, “Don’t believe everything that comes from the pulpit.” All three of her sisters, she notes, make the bulk of their family income.

“My parents are so pleased with us,” says Jill. “They are tickled pink at how we women turned out.”

And finally, consider four young women sitting at an outdoor table in midtown Atlanta, Georgia, on a balmy Saturday in late winter. Two are engineers, one is a banker, and another is an entrepreneur. All are in their early twenties. All earn between $65,000 and $90,000, just a couple of years out of college. In most American cities, single childless women between 22 and 30 make more, in terms of median income, than their male peers, a direct result of the fact that women are now better-educated than men. Of all the major cities where young women outearn young men, Atlanta is number one. Well do these women know the accuracy of that statistic. “I have never had a boyfriend who made more than me,” says one of them. Over steak salads and spring rolls, the Atlanta women share techniques on how to make the men they date feel comfortable, and as they talk it becomes clear they are also describing how they make themselves feel comfortable. One likes to let her boyfriend drive her car. She carries lots of petty cash—singles and fives—so she can discreetly pay for tips and parking and entrance fees in a way that seems less obtrusive than flashing around a credit card. “You never actually show them how much money it’s costing,” she says. “You never want them to be aware of how much work you’re putting in.”

She adds: “I want at the end of the night for someone not to remember who paid.”

Another woman at the table buys movie tickets in advance, and then tells her boyfriend they were given away at work. This same woman recently got a promotion at the consulting company she works for, along with a raise higher than she expected. She struggled to know how to share this with her boyfriend, a manager at a Waffle House who took that job because it was the only one he could find that was near her. She loves her work, and her boyfriend hates his, and the day after her big news he was in tears over how thankless and chaotic his own job is. How do you handle that? How do you celebrate you...