When wives are making more than husbands, neither wants to admit it

The share of women who earn more than their husbands, while still relatively small, is growing. When women do earn more, both husbands and wives seem uncomfortable — to the point of lying about it.

That is the finding of a new paper from the Census Bureau, which compared what respondents told census surveyors about their earnings with what their employers told the IRS in tax filings.

In opposite-sex marriages in which women earned more, women said, on average, that they earned 1.5 percentage points less than they actually did. Their husbands said they earned 2.9 percentage points more than they did.

The census researchers, Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness, concluded that people thought it was more socially desirable for men to earn more — so whether fudging the numbers was a conscious or unconscious choice, these social norms affected their answers. They called it “manning up and womaning down.”

It shows just how sticky gender roles can be — and how much slower they are to change than the way people live their lives. Women are now much more likely to have an education and a career.

Yet across most marriages, they still do much more child care and housework than their husbands, and men still feel strong pressure to be the family breadwinner.

Today, women earn more than men in about a quarter of couples, according to the new study and previous research, up from 18 percent in the 1980s. Yet 71 percent of people say that to be a good husband, men should be able to financially support a family, a Pew Research Center survey found last year. Only one-third said that about women.

The results show how much social norms can influence the answers people give in surveys. “It raises rather metaphysical questions for all social scientists: What happens when the phenomenon you’re studying affects the data you use to study it?” said Justin Wolfers, who studies family economics at the University of Michigan. The Census Bureau said it was working to improve the quality of survey results on earnings by comparing them with other reported sources.

A large study by economists at the University of Chicago, using census data from 1970-2000, found that marriages in which the woman earned more were less likely to form in the first place, and more likely to end in divorce. Women who outearned their husbands were more likely to seek jobs beneath their potential, they found, and to do significantly more housework and child care than their husbands — perhaps to make their husbands feel less threatened.

Yet expectations about men have been slower to change. When men are unemployed or underemployed, women are less likely to consider them marriage material, and more likely to want a divorce.