Bargaining Bonus or Breadwinning Burden? Wives’ Relative Earnings, Childrearing, and Depression

Abstract

This study examines the relevancy of household bargaining processes, childrearing demands, and traditionally gendered breadwinning norms for explaining the implications of married women’s earnings relative to those of their spouse for depression. Drawing on 1992–2014 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort, results indicate that shared breadwinning is negatively associated with depression among wives without minor children. Yet despite the salubriousness of employment, shared breadwinning is linked to worse depression for wives with a youngest child aged 0 to 12 or with two or more children 18 and younger. Contrary to expectations from the gender performance perspective, there is minimal evidence that greater relative earnings worsen depression among wives who out-earn their spouse. Results imply that when childrearing demands are high, mothers’ contributions to couples’ earnings function as an additional demand rather than a resource for their own well-being.

Gender, Emotions, and Mental Health in the United States: Patterns, Explanations, and New Directions

“…Sociologists have identified several stressors to which employed wives are disproportionately exposed compared to employed husbands. Their relatively lower wages and more restrictive occupations, the limited availability of affordable high-quality childcare outside the home for which they are primarily responsible, as well as the failure of men to participate equitably in housework and childcare within the home all contribute to the gender disparity in depression in two-income marriages (Bird 1999; Glass and Fugimoto 1994; Lennon 1987; Lennon and Rosenfield 1995; Luepp 2017, Forthcoming; Ross and Mirowsky 1988; Roxburgh 1996).…”

Breadwinning, Occupational Sex Composition, and Stress: Examining Psychological Distress and Heavy Drinking at the Intersection of Gender and Race

“…Modeling relative earnings as having a curvilinear relationship with heavy drinking (Model 4 in Online Appendix Table A4) shows that both the linear and quadratic terms of relative earnings are significantly different between white women and white men, between white women and Black men, between Black women and Black men, as well as between white men and Black men ( p < .05 for all). To better understand how the patterns differ, splines were used in supplementary analysis (see Hook 2016; Leupp 2020). Results indicate that when comparing white men and Black men in particular, the major difference in the relationship between relative earnings and heavy drinking occurs for the 0–50 percent range—that is, when moving from economic dependency to equal breadwinning—consistent with what Figure 1B and 1C demonstrate.…”

“…Last, family and work characteristics are included (Flèche, Lepinteur, and Powdthavee 2020; Leupp 2020). Family-related variables include the presence of a child younger than 6 at home , number of minor children at home (top coded at 4), and whether the respondent was ever divorced .…”

“…Rogers and DeBoer (2001), for example, showed that increases in wives’ relative income lower husbands’ but improve wives’ well-being (also see Blaisure and Allen 1995; Ferree 1976). Leupp (2020) reported that greater relative earnings predict more depressive symptoms for mothers with childrearing demands but fewer depressive symptoms for women without children, especially among women who earn less than their spouse.…”

“…I control for covariates that have been found to correlate with the key predictors and the outcomes (Kramer and Pak 2018;Leupp 2020;Springer 2010;Winslow-Bowe 2009). Time-varying covariables are lagged by one wave to ensure temporal order, except for age, age squared, work hours, and household income (work hours and income-related measures refer to the year before the survey year, so are already lagged).…”