[Translation: Correlation does not equal causation.]
science
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
My wife easily does 80% or more of the housework. She makes less than half what I do. The thing is, she only works 40 hours or so a week compared to my 60 or so. I'm not glorifying my overwork, I hate that I work so much. I'm also out of town during the week days more than half the time.
I would be thrilled if she made more than me. We could hire a cleaning service and we would be so happy. This shit is insane and probably bad science.
It keeps coming up and 'experts' profess this occasionally. I'm too lazy to check the actual science, so I'll never know.
Please Lord let me find a woman that makes the same as me and I'll happily retire a Pinterest mom and support her career. I love my kid, my home, my time, my flexibility, optimizing systems with cart blanche..
Maybe this happens because the woman who earns more often emasculates her husband with snide remarks or jabs. Unlike the other way round where men are expected to earn more than their spouse otherwise they're "less of a man".
Maybe that's contributing to the higher mental health issues.
Oh for fucks sake. No wonder this study is ridiculous. It's an economist trying to make inferences on mental health. The only actual data he had is a correlation in mental health diagnoses and women earning significantly* more. (Number not defined)
He has no evidence for causation. He does no work to get rid of confounding factors like toxic masculinity's famous dislike of therapy. He just sees a rise in the pure number of diagnoses and says women earning more is bad for the mental health of both people in a marriage. He doesn't even bother to check what the diagnoses are, or look for any kind of severity. For all we know the finding here could be that women who earn more and men who are willing to be with them seek counseling earlier than couples where the man makes more.
This is shit science.
Yep. The guy got a large publicly available dataset (or one his university had access to) and mined it for interesting results to get a publication.
Was talking to a cute girl at a New Years Eve party, and it came out that while I made a nice amount for doing very little work, she made even more but had to do a lot of work. I went straight to daydreaming about being a stay-at-home Dad so hard I almost fell off my chair.
Dudes, more money means more money, why on earth would having more money upset you???
more money is not the goal of a long term relationship or at least, ought not be. I hope this person had other attractive qualities in addition to freeing you from working.
well, I mean, she was a cute girl with a steady job, so, already got one up on the ol' ex 🤷♂️
I'm willing to bet it's selection bias. They have more time for therapy and openness to the idea. It's one of those studies that just looks at the numbers at the top of everything. X couples got divorced, Y people sought counseling, etc.
The most they can say is there's an increased correlation in seeking mental help.
Perhaps households where women earn more money are also made of people where the male partner feels more comfortable seeking mental health resources. Or perhaps they have better insurance and can afford it.
I would suggest that "Wives earning more than husbands" isn't the issue so much as "Cost of living is outpacing household earnings and men have been conditioned through generations of patriarchy to believe this is a personal failing rather than a broad economic shift".
If your wife is bringing in seven figures, I doubt the husband will lose much sleep. But if you're looking at a $30k paycheck to your wife's $40k paycheck, and you both acknowledge the total isn't enough to live on, there's a lot of anxiety to go around in that situation.
Agreed. I don't think it's about wives earning more than their husbands at all.
Yes, the link is this:
When all the adults in the household have to work 40+ hours a week, plus commute, plus all the adulting...they get sad since this is fucking toxic.
Also no one has time for civics.
Also no one has time to parent, so the kids are sad too.
If we're looking at mental health problems, lets look here first.