Research on Female Breadwinners Gets Twisted Media Coverage

Nearly one-third of U.S. households now have a woman as the sole or main earner. To better understand how being the household’s primary breadwinner affects women’s experiences and their gendered identities, Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri, interviewed 15 female breadwinners living with male partners in the eastern and Midwestern United States.

The results of her research were published this month. Meisenbach identified six themes common to her participants’ lives: "opportunities for control, independence, pressure and worry, valuing partner’s contributions, guilt and resentment, and ambition."

Many of us don’t need a study to confirm what we already know from personal or observed experience: being a female breadwinner can be a double-edged sword. For the women in this admittedly small, homogeneous sample, the breadwinner role brings independence and empowerment, financial control, and the satisfaction of a career. But there’s also worrying over both finances and housework, since women still tend to do more domestic chores, even as primary earners. There’s the need to validate the male partner’s contributions so that he doesn’t feel emasculated by a society that expects him to fulfill the role of provider. If the woman is a mother, there’s the guilt of leaving her child in another person’s care, and there’s the societal pressure to be an ideal worker and supermom at the same time.

According to Meisenbach, there’s been little to no research to date that focuses specifically on the individual experiences of female breadwinners. So it's too bad that virtually all the major media coverage of the study (mostly in the British press, as the American press has hardly bothered to cover the study at all) got the facts egregiously wrong, inverting the findings to focus on men’s experiences and validate sexist malarkey. I saw misleading headlines such as, “Working Mothers Perpetuating Myth of 'The Useless Man' to Feel More Feminine,” and, "'Myth' of Mr. Useless: Why Women Breadwinners Exaggerate Partner’s Faults.”

The articles cite Meisenbach’s observation that female breadwinners often used gendered language to articulate their disproportionate attention to household chores, i.e. "I just have to ask because, I mean he's a man, and they don't see that there's a mess." Meisenbach posits that this language "is a way to retain claims to an element of a traditional feminine identity," and, "[make] sure they still fit gender boundaries of a wife as someone who manages the home and children." In a great leap of barely comprehensible logic, the articles use these statements as proof that women are fabricating their partners' shortcomings in the domestic sphere in order to feel more womanly.

Actually, the women's statements are supported by several studies that Meisenbach cites in her report. Among the findings: when a husband is economically dependent on his wife, he actually does less housework over time, and wives who are full-time employees still tend to do more domestic and overall work than their male partners. Most of the women in the study described themselves as typically both in charge of and responsible for the housework, and “wanted more help and housework initiative from their partners.”

If anything, the study reinforces the idea that men are not usually equal partners in the domestic sphere. But Meisenbach found that far from being "nags," the women in the study repeatedly made attempts to show their appreciation for their partner’s contributions. So was it sexism or sloppy journalism that accounts for the misappropriation of Meisenbach’s study as a vindication of useless men everywhere?

I’d say a little of both. Various news reports cited a “major” study involving 15,000 women, leading me to believe that none of these journalists so much as set an eyeball on the study. But what irks me the most is that the media took a study that explicitly and purposefully focused on women’s emotions and experiences and not only invalidated them, but also reframed the story as one about men. This narrative, this myth of the "useless man myth," is turning into a meme: I’ve seen it reproduced without edit or fact-check on French and German sites.

If you want the real deal, the most accurate reporting I've found on the study by a major news outlet can be found here.

Photo credit: Alan Chan