The husband emailed me this earlier with the message, "Don't shoot the messenger" attached.

LONDON - Married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework, according to a report on Wednesday from BritainÂ’s Institute for Social and Economic Research.

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or donÂ’t do most of the housework.

“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labor economist, told Reuters.

“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex in eastern England.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.{...}

Have no fear, my devoted Cake Eater Readers, the husband will be live and well for quite some time. I can't shoot him: he's the breadwinner.

Heheheheheh.

All kidding aside, though, this doesn't surprise me one bit. I learned long ago that no matter what I did, or how brilliantly I did it, he will always make more money than me. While I don't dismiss out of hand the possibility that I, someday, could overtake him in the money department, I don't think it likely and it's simply because he has a different skill set than I do. I have a Liberal Arts---would you like fries with that?---degree; he has a Business---we need to be thinking about the P/E ratio---degree. He's also heavily interested in and has been working in IT for years now. I haven't. Hence, he's made himself highly marketable, whereas I haven't. It makes sense, then, to spend my time working on my stuff, whilst doing stuff around here to clear his schedule. While I'm sure some bra-burning, hairy-armpitted feminist thinks I'm subjugating myself to his will, that's not the case. It makes more sense, financially speaking, to maximize his potential and if that means taking care of the chores around the house, well, so be it. If the situation was reversed, it would make an equal amount of sense for him to take care of the chores.

What would interest me, however, is if someone did a study to see how marriage affected a woman's earning potential when her husband was the one to stay at home.

Posted by: Kathy at 01:35 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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