March 12, 2007 9:37 PM

The 24-hour woman
Posted by Diane Danielsonat 9:37 PM

Interesting article in the Boston Globe magazine about breadwinner wives who still handle all the housework. Here's hoping that the women featured stop letting the mommy guilt get to them and they either start delegating the housework more or get that housekeeper!

Women are the maids-in-chief in the average American home (18 hours a week of housework on average, about 40 percent more than men, according to a 2001 study by University of Maryland sociologists). This made sense, sort of, back when women's occupations were limited to variations on caring for other people, usually the ones living at home with them. But it makes no sense today. Women, who compose 49 percent of the American workforce, are now outearning their husbands in 32.6 percent of American married couples, up from 23.7 percent in 1987. Wives brought home 34.8 percent of the average family's annual bacon in 2004, up from 26.7 percent in 1980. In another generation, if this pace of change continues, wives will contribute half. Although there are no local statistics, it would seem likely that Boston has an even larger percentage of these women who earn more than their husbands, thanks to a saturation of industries, like financial services and healthcare, in which women are statistically more likely to be top company earners.

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The same study showed that when women start contributing more than 50 percent to the family income, the amount of housework the husband does actually begins to fall and continues to fall as the wife's earnings climb. And here's the really depressing part: The study also reported that when a wife becomes a family's sole provider, she often does even more housework than when she contributes half the income.

Some experts attribute this phenomenon to what they call "gender deviation neutralization." By "deviating" from established gender roles by outearning the husband, the wife believes she is emasculating him. Men largely define their maleness by rejecting femaleness, so he refuses to be further de-maled by doing housework. The wife, meanwhile, feels so guilty for emasculating her husband that she overcompensates by taking on even more of the traditional female roles to act more "feminine" so her husband will feel more "masculine." Et voila! We've got a female CEO cleaning her toilets at 2 a.m. because she feels too guilty to hire a housekeeper or demand that her husband do it.

Seems like the old Enjoli perfume commercial has come true but with a twist -- We can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and then do all the housework so we don't emasculate our man.