I recently ran across “Men With Traditional Views on Sex Roles Earn More Money” (written by Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer at LiveScience.com) and decided to add my own thoughts on that topic.
For example, the article reports that:
“Results showed that men who reported having more traditional gender role attitudes made an average of about $8,500 more annually than those who had less traditional attitudes. Women who held more traditional views about gender roles made an average of $1,500 less annually than the women with more egalitarian views.”
There were a number of additional findings, but they were mostly what you would have expected.
For example, they found that “People whose parents both worked outside the home had less traditional views”. But that could easily have been predicted.
This study goes back only 30 years but if you go back to the “olden days” (more than 40 years ago), it was commonplace for men to be the sole breadwinner and for wives to be stay-at-home housewives and mothers.
That was the traditional
pattern back then
But even then, quite a few women worked.
- Most grade school teachers were women.
- Most nurses were women.
- Airline stewards and stewardesses were nearly all the latter.
- Swimsuit models were mostly women.
- Receptionists, secretaries and stenographers were nearly all women.
- Sales clerks in stores were mostly women.
So even then, the “traditional pattern” was not universal.
In some cases, the women were working since they had not yet found a husband (but fully expected to quit work and stay home once they had maneuvered a guy to the altar).
In other cases, women had been stay-at-home housewives but when the kids were grown and hubby was high enough up in the business world that he was gone a lot (and probably had a mistress on the side), some women went back to work out of sheer boredom and a desire for more human interaction.
But otherwise, married women (especially those with kids who were not yet fully grown) worked for one reason: they had to.
Rich Husbands, Poor Husbands
If hubby made the equivalent of $500,000 a year in today’s dollars, wives had the option of not working and nearly all took it. But if her hubby made the equivalent of only about $15,000 a year in today’s dollars, then it was a different story. Two paychecks were needed to scrape by.
So, people from 30 years ago whose parents both worked could only mean one thing: they came from a poor family.
There was no stigma in that demographic about a mom working because there was no other choice if one’s family was poor. Every extra cent was needed. That was the reality.
The other finding which caught my eye was “Younger people had less traditional views, but became more traditional over time”.
I believe it.
Feminist Lies at Work
Most women I’ve known who came out of a university were indoctrinated with modern feminist ideology and looked down on women who chose to be stay-at-home moms (as being both pathetic and a traitor to the cause). But after five or 10 or 15 years in the working world, a lot of those women lost the haughty attitudes.
Why? They learned that work was not all that it was cracked up to be.
Most work is not especially exciting or fulfilling. Most companies are not particularly benevolent to their employees (but rather see their workers as entities to be squeezed in terms of output and costs).
- Corporate politics? Out of control at many companies.
- Company loyalty to employees? That’s well on the way to becoming an endangered species.
- Megabucks paychecks? Not from most jobs.
That’s the reality: most jobs are not all that enjoyable. That’s why it’s called “work”.
And after 10 or 15 years on the gerbil wheel as “wage slaves”, the traditional model (of letting hubby be the wage slave) gets to looking a lot better to many women.
The author also quotes one of the researchers as having said:
“… if your interest is to reduce the gender wage gap, then teaching your children and adhering to non-traditional attitudes toward gender roles is the way to go. If that’s your goal, we have to work on promoting less traditional attitudes toward gender.”
That one puzzles me a bit. Seems to me that “reducing the gender wage gap” is solely an ideological goal.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for you to teach your children to be open-minded enough to discover what formula works best for themselves when the time comes?
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
