IPR Research Notes

Who's Bringing Home the Bacon
Developing a new measure of economic independence between the sexes

Winter 2008 , Volume 30, Number 1

Since the 1970s, more women have gone to work and received higher wages on average. Yet have women achieved the same level of economic independence as men?

Sociologist Leslie McCall, who is interested in questions of income and gender inequality, recently conducted a study to examine how martial status, marital patterns, earnings, and gender affect people’s position in the income distribution. She is associate professor of sociology, AT&T Research Scholar, and an IPR faculty fellow.

McCall notes that it is important to study economic independence for men and women separately to provide a better understanding of men’s growing dependence on spousal income, as well as women’s increasing independence.

For her study, McCall developed a formula that correlates each worker’s own earnings to his or her total family income from all sources, including the earnings of other family members and government transfers. This correlation produces a measure of equality in the degree of dependency for women and men in society overall—and not within each family, the usual measure of dependency on spousal earnings. She then used data from the Current Population Survey on 25- to 54-year-old mainly white men and women between 1968 and 2000 to determine how their positions in the income distribution have changed over time.

What she finds is that the women became more economically independent of family income, doubling their scores from 27 percent to 62 percent of men’s correlation from 1970 to 2000. Surprisingly, the men’s level of economic independence barely budged (rising to a correlation of 83 percent from 81 percent in 1970), despite a significant decrease in the number of husbands with stay-at-home wives.

McCall suggests that this finding reveals men’s continued economic dominance in marriage as two-thirds of married couples continue to rely exclusively or primarily on the husband’s earnings. This continued male dominance is due to several factors, but 80 percent of the higher independence of men stems from significantly higher male wages in families where their wives, who carry the load of childcare responsibilities, work part-time or not at all.

“Women’s and Men’s Position in the Income Distribution: The Changing Roles of Own Earnings and Other Family Income, 1970-2000” is online at www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/mccallpapers.html.