“The Gender Cliff in the Relative Contribution to the Household Income: Insights from Modeling Marriage Markets in 27 European Countries”, 2020-01-10 (; backlinks; similar):
In Western countries, the distribution of relative incomes within marriages tends to be skewed in a remarkable way. Husbands usually do not only earn more than their female partners, but there is also a striking discontinuity in their relative contributions to the household income at the 50:50 point: many wives contribute just a bit less than or as much as their husbands, but few contribute more. This ‘cliff’ has been interpreted as evidence that men and women avoid situations where a wife would earn more than her husband, since this would go against traditional gender norms.
In this paper, we use a simulation approach to model marriage markets and demonstrate that a cliff in the relative income distribution can also emerge without such avoidance. We feed our simulations with income data from 27 European countries.
Results: show that a cliff can emerge from inequalities in men’s and women’s average incomes, even if they do not attach special meaning to a situation in which a wife earns more than her husband.
…The observed discontinuity in the distribution of relative incomes within households would be consistent with a norm that favours male superiority in income, if such a norm existed. However, in this paper, we argue that such a norm is not necessary to generate a discontinuity. Instead, we suggest that a cliff may emerge even if both men and women prefer partners with high income over partners with low income, if we consider that even in the most gender egalitarian societies women’s average income is lower than men’s.
Our argument is based on the following intuition. If people strive for high-income partners, men who rank high in the male income distribution will be in the best position to compete for women who rank high in the female income distribution, vice versa. Some men may therefore form unions with similar-income partners, but because women’s average income is lower, many men will face a shortage of partners with similar or even higher income. Unless they are willing to remain single, these men will have to form unions with women who earn less than they do. Women, by contrast, will have to ‘settle’ less often for a lower-income partner. These differences in men’s and women’s marriage market opportunities are likely to not only create a right skew in the distribution of women’s contribution to household income, but also a discontinuity close to the 50:50 point. This occurs even if people are not more aversive of a situation in which the wife out-earns her husband than of a situation in which he out-earns her.
We demonstrate the logical consistency and empirical plausibility of our argument with a simulation study in which we compare the outcomes of a simple marriage market model with the observed distributions of relative income in the 27 countries shown in Figure 1. The model assumes that men and women strive for a high joint income in the unions that they form, while using their own income as a point of reference for determining the minimum income they expect in a partner. However, they do not evaluate a situation in which a wife out-earns her husband any differently from a situation in which he out-earns her. Our results show that partner choice based on this preference tends to generate a right skew in the distribution of relative incomes within households and, most importantly, a discontinuity at the 50:50 point.