Examining Husband-Wife Differences in the Meaning of Family Financial Support

Abstract

The author examines the affective meanings (evaluation, potency, and activity) that seventy-eight heterosexual married or cohabiting couples attach to the act of financially supporting their family and finds that husbands consider their support more valuable and more active than their wives consider theirs. Using the couple as the unit of analysis, the author considers four hypotheses for these gender differences: Job status, deviance neutralization, gender ideology, and gender display. Consistent with the job status hypotheses and inconsistent with the deviance neutralization hypotheses, the husband-wife differences in the evaluation and activity ratings become nonsignificant when spouses have the same job-related status (earnings, education, and work hours). Consistent with one gender ideology hypothesis, spouses evaluate their family breadwinning more similarly in couples with a liberal wife than they do in couples with a conservative wife. And consistent with a gender display hypothesis, conservative husbands who earn less than their conservative wives evaluate their breadwinning more positively than their wives evaluate theirs, suggesting that conservatives who deviate from gender norms in their relative earnings characterize their breadwinning in a way that neutralizes that deviance. Unexpectedly, the author also finds evidence of “gender equalization” among couples with a liberal wife: These spouses view their breadwinning somewhat similarly even when the husband's education exceeds the wife's, suggesting that liberals characterize their breadwinning in a way that neutralizes the deviance (for liberals) of traditional education differences.