Marital Satisfaction and Sex Role Perceptions among Dual-Earner Couples

Abstract

This article proposes that traditional expectations regarding the spouse are still positively related to marital satisfaction. Dual-earner couples were asked to compare their intelligence, competence, professional success, and income to their spouse's and to estimate their marital satisfaction. Their responses showed that marital satisfaction is often related to perceptions that spouses fit sex-role stereotypes (i.e., both husbands and wives perceive the husband as superior). The wives showed significant correlations between marital satisfaction and perceiving husbands as superior on all four dimensions chosen for examination. Even women employed in male-dominated occupations seemed to find these traditional expectations important, and there were no differences between them and women employed in traditional female occupations. For the husbands, significant correlations in the predicted direction appeared only on two dimensions, income and professional success (i.e., their marital satisfaction was related to their perceptions of their wives' inferiority on these two dimensions). However, there was a significant positive correlation between marital satisfaction and perceiving themselves as less intelligent than their wives.