Doug Dowson

speaker

119 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Aug

Doug Dowson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Economist Podcasts · Taking the shine off: albedo and global temperatures · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

So there's a survey that is conducted every few years called the World Value Survey.

It asks respondents whether the fact that a woman earned more than a man is going to cause problems or not.

And when that was posed to Americans a couple years ago, only 10% said yes.

Yes, and that was actually one of the lowest shares in any country that was surveyed.

So on paper, Americans seem to be really comfortable with this idea of women in relationships out-earning their male partners.

But when you dig into the data and you look at

the dynamics in actual relationships, you see that they seem to be a lot less comfortable with this concept than they actually claim in these surveys.

So there was a study done about a decade ago by an economist at the University of Chicago, and she looked at married couples in America, and she looked at the distribution of couples by how much the wife contributed to the household income.

And what you would expect is that this distribution would be the normal distribution, kind of a bell shape.

And in fact, what she found was that when you look at the midpoint where the women in the relationship would start to out-earn their husbands, there was a big drop.

So what that suggested was that American wives are not very comfortable telling the Census Bureau that they out-earned their husband.

And the husbands that are surveyed are similarly not comfortable saying that their wives make more money than them.

So instead of seeing this kind of very smooth relationship, there was a big discontinuity, a big drop, suggesting that American couples aren't that comfortable with this idea of the female breadwinner.

So when you look at the research on this subject, you see that while Americans have fairly egalitarian opinions on this, when they're actually in a relationship where there's a female breadwinner, it seems to more often cause problems than with relationships with a male breadwinner.

So these traditional norms don't seem to go away, and they cause some problems, some strain in relationships.

There's studies for years showing that divorce is more likely, more common in these kinds of relationships.

Recent studies in America and Sweden and Australia showing that husbands who are out-earned by their wives report poor mental health.

And the costs aren't just borne by the husbands.

I mean, when you pull the wives in these relationships, they also report less satisfaction with their relationship.

And part of this may be due to the fact that high-earning wives are often responsible not only for earning more money, but also then coming home and having to take care of household duties, childcare, things like that.

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