Taxes and the breadwinner family

It's a good occasion to make a comment about income taxes. I spend much of my time fretting over the state and direction of the country, but I should focus on the bright side: I paid roughly negative $2000 to the federal government this year. And I didn't even have mortgage interest to deduct. How did I do it? By having four children and a wife who doesn't work outside the home. The government paid me! What a sweet deal. What a country. My thanks to all the childless rich people who make this possible. The status quo feels so good, maybe I'm going to have to vote for Obama in 2012.

Social status and women in the workplace

General Social Survey participants were asked: "Do you approve or disapprove of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?"

I looked for factors that would predict disapproval of women working (sample size = 6,600):

Logistic regression coefficients (odds)

Age 1.02*
Conservatism 1.03
Female .92
IQ .98*
Education .96*
Job prestige .99*
Church attendance 1.05*

* p < .05, two-tailed

The coefficients are displayed in terms of odds. For example, each year of age raises the odds that one will disapprove of a woman working by a factor of 1.02, or 2 percent. An odds of 1.00 indicates that the factor is unrelated to the outcome variable.

Older, lower status, and religious folks are more likely to disapprove of married women working. Gender and political orientation have no significant effect, so men and women, and conservatives and liberals do not differ in their attitudes.

The listed groups have been slower to give up on the breadwinner model of family life. This is odd for the lower status groups since they could use a second income more than better off groups. Lower- and working-class folks--women as well as men--are more likely to "cling" to traditional notions of manhood (e.g., the leader, the provider) while elites have abandoned such ideas as outdated and misogynistic. 

Most poor, married women work, but they still have the ideal of a strong man who will take care of them. Simpler people are not quite as giddy as the educated class about an androgynous world with female ultimate fighters and men in aprons.