賺錢養家的人: breadwinner
頂客族: DINK= Dual Income, No Kids
參考:
The Spousal Safety Net
By NANCY FOLBRE
In today’s economy, men are lucky if they have a wife in their portfolio. Traditional women’s jobs have been hit less hard by recession than men’s jobs. Many married women have softened the financial impact of their husbands’ unemployment by finding jobs or increasing their hours of paid work.
As a result, dual-earner households are becoming more dual. A recent briefing paper by Kristin Smith of the Carsey Institute of the University of New Hampshire documents a sharp uptick in historical trends. Wives now contribute 47 percent of family income in married-couple households where the wives are employed.
Kristin Smith, Carsey Institute,
University of New Hampshire
Professor Smith explains that increased reliance on wives’ earnings largely reflects a recession-related decline in men’s employment and earnings.University of New Hampshire
Past estimates have suggested that the effect of a husband’s unemployment on his wife’s participation in paid employment — termed the added-worker effect — is small.
But in the past, unemployment was often temporary. Today, the average duration of unemployment has reached a record high.
Not surprisingly, we now see evidence of a significant added-worker effect – more specifically a husband-without-a-job effect.
In a just-published article in the journal Family Relations, Professor Smith and her colleague and co-author Marybeth J. Mattingly offer a fascinating comparison of how wives responded when husbands moved out of paid employment between May of 2004 and May 2005 (a period of economic expansion) and between May 2008 and May 2009 (a period of recession).
Wives increased their hours of paid employment significantly more in the second period, helping explain why their relative contribution to family income increased. Declines in family wealth (such as the value of a home) probably intensified the effect of persistently high unemployment rates among men, pushing married women to accept jobs they might have refused in the earlier period.
The spousal safety net didn’t help all couples, because not all wives were able to find employment. Also, it’s unlikely that the increase in wives’ earnings fully compensated for the decline in husbands’ earnings, because, as Professor Smith points out, women employed full-time year-round earn, on average, about 83 percent of what their male counterparts earn.
One wonders if men who stopped working for pay began doing more work around the house. Research on the time use of men without jobs in the United States finds that they don’t devote much more time to housework and child care than other men. However, husbands who become more dependent on a wife’s earnings over time are likely to be more responsive.
Pooling income and housework doesn’t magically guarantee economic security. As the sociologist Jacob Hacker points out in The Great Risk Shift, unemployment of either spouse can jolt family income. Some married couples have fallen into what Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi call the two-income trap, borrowing more than they afford.
But married men – who tend to be better educated and more affluent than single men both before and after marriage — clearly benefit from their wives’ earning potential.
Perhaps the traditional marriage vow needs an update: For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in expansion or recession, in short-term or especially long-term unemployment.
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