Sense and Sensibility

So Women Are Smarter and Richer, What Now?

My friend is a “Sugar Mama.”

She’s got a six figure job, a mansion in a stately Boston suburb, a house on the Vineyard— and a husband to stay home with the kids.

This arrangement has given her pause over the years. There have been acute spasms of guilt when she was ready to ditch the whole stiletto-and-Blackberry thing for Silly Putty and Build-a-Bear. But her less-marketable husband could never pull in the Croesus purse that she does, and so the couple has decided to do what many others have done, have one parent stay in the cave and the other slay the dragons.

Except that in my friend’s case, the woman is the dragon slayer.

And in the eight years that she has been pulling this off, a lot of women have joined her.

A new study finds that married women are making, as Katie Couric might say, a lot of jack.

The study, from the Pew Center for Research, found that more women are marrying men with less education and lower earnings. Men, increasingly, are marrying women who are better educated and make more money.

The Pew study followed news that the number of working mothers who are sole breadwinners in their families rose last year to an all-time high, while the number of stay-at-home dads inched upwards. The U.S. Census reported that in most of the homes with women as breadwinners, both parents had worked until the recession, which sliced with particular ferocity into male-dominated jobs like finance and construction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports hat 78 percent of jobs lost during the recession were held by men, and that women’s wages have risen by 1.2 percent more than men’s over the past two years.

Anybody who had been following education trends was unlikely to be surprised at the findings; women have been outpacing males in college enrollment for some years now. College degrees tend to increase earning power, even in a landscape when women still earn 78 percent of what men earn. At some point, those women were going to marry, produce children and face the thorny question of who was going to sacrifice what.

It seems hard to believe that only a few years ago, hard-core feminists were lobbying grenades into the “Mommy Wars” lambasting uber-educated women for “opting out” of the labor force to spend time with their children. Fewer women are able to do that today; the Census reports that the number of stay at home moms declined from 5.3 million to 5.1 million last year.

All of this is a seismic shift in American marriage; only 40 years ago, teachers, stewardesses and others were summarily fired if they got married. “Marriage is a different deal than it was 40 years ago,” Pew economist Roger Fry, told USA Today. “Typically, most wives did not work, so for economic well-being, marriage penalized guys with more mouths to feed by no extra income. Now most wives work. For guys, the economics of marriage have become much more beneficial.”

Marriage has always been a good bet for men. As Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her new book, “committed,” Married men live longer than single men; . . . married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.”

And now it’s even better.

None of this means that men are “opting out” of wingtips for Webkinz. Stay-at-home dads represent a mere 1 percent of the population. And many women agonize over the wrenching decision between maternity and material needs. But certain aspects of marriage and society are sure to change. In spite of their increased involvement with housework, men still lag significantly behind women in household chores. The National Science Foundation reports that while married women with more than three kids spend about 28 hours weekly on housework, married men spend only 10.

More critically, as Gail Collins points out in her new book, “When Everything Changed,” for all feminism has accomplished, it has left the question of caring for children in the dustbin. Women still wrestle with questions of child care that continue to baffle, dishearten and divide them.

Most women are not Sugar Mamas. But in two-thirds of American families, according to the Shriver Report, they are either the primary or co-breadwinner. Most of them haven’t the luxury of a stay-at-home Dad. For those women, sprinting from work to home, where they confront the “Second Shift” of laundry, cooking and shuttling kids to and from activities, the news that women make more and are educated better is an abstraction cloaked as a victory. They don’t feel empowered; they just feel tired, and harbor a sneaking suspicion that if men bore children, this question would already be solved.