Hugo Schwyzer says

The blogosphere and the mainstream media have … had much to say about the Pew study released Tuesday that shows that more than ever before, men are likely to marry women with more education and earning potential than they themselves have. From the Times story:

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s.

He said it here.

Seems to me that part of the effect would just naturally follow from an equalization in earning rates and earnings potential. Past a certain point it just doesn’t make sense that on the one hand earnings would be approaching parity but on the other people would still be scrambling to find men who earned more than women.

I mean, yeah, I strongly suspect that urge is still there. (You can actually sort of see that effect where, for whatever reason, men in relationshps tend to be, say, taller or older than their women partners even though in aggregate there’s obviously substantially more overlap in men’s and women’s heights and ages. And I’m certainly aware of individuals who won’t consider a woman partner who earns more or, in a couple of cases even more emphatically, women who won’t consider a partner who earns less. Preference has a strong pull. And I’m guessing that’s partly why why the marriage numbers aren’t already closer to aggregate earnings ratios.

Still, past a certain point a lot of marriage-inclined heterosexuals are going to have to, well, “settle” for relationships where close to 50% of the time the woman earns as much as or more than the man. Not that that’s the end of the world — 50% of men would by-definition also be earning the same as or more than the woman.

Or am I missing something here?

The best thing from my perspective would be that since women who have children still spend some time out of the workforce (in my experience three months for the rarely mentioned “fourth trimester” isn’t unreasonable) and therefore put some fraction of their earnings potential on hold (at least till we get solid progressive family leave policies) then it makes sense that women ought to at least start out with higher incomes. (It makes sense that their partners would also support that.)

The advantages are considerable: there’s be no particular intra-family earnings imbalance due to children, there’s be no strong incentive for the partner who stayed at home with the first child to stay at home with the next, etc. And if the family did decide to go the “traditional” avenue where the woman stays home with succeeding children she’d still have an easier path towards reaching income parity when she chooses to return to the workforce.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be that way As we see in parts of Scandinavia for instance a really strong public/private/family network can be pretty powerful. But at least for now it is that way. And so a trend towards women earning more, at least initially, at least in theory, ought to support more egalitarian — and therefore stronger — long-term relationships.

Over time people are going to stop hauling out traditionalist “silver linings” the way the article Hugo cite does, and instead start noticing that the end results are more egalitarian. I’m guessing it’ll take one more generation but I’m pretty sure we’ll see the first articles discovering the virtues before then.

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One other thing, by the way. The article Hugo quotes in turn quotes political economist Stephanie Coontz

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

I’m… kind of curious whether the well-documented tendency for married men to be healthier and happier in marriage than women is an artifact of them having what amounts to a stay-at-home personal caregiver. And consequently I’ll be curious if those numbers hold up when divisions of labor equalize inside as well as outside the home. My intuition would be yes. Although based on personal experience and those I’ve seen of other relationships with lower-earning and stay-at-home dads is that their partners really are going to have to give up the traditional and/or “second shift” notions about who establishes and enforces domestic standards and practices. Also based on experience this will have a lot more to do with when working women stop being judged by themselves and others on domestic decor, schedules, etc., even when it’s very, very clear it’s not their responsibility. (For instance how often are working men judged personally when their stay-at-home partner doesn’t iron the sheets?)