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Women, Men, and Money

According to this month's Money Magazine, finances still cause strife in many marriages.

Okay, so this shouldn't be news to anyone. But what is notable is that the majority of the couples surveyed divide their financial responsibility along very traditional gender lines. Women tend to be responsible for determining daily spending while their husbands plan long-term investments, retirements etc. According to the magazine, dividing duties up this way doesn’t necessarily foster communication:

[M]en and women had dramatically different ideas about who does what with the family finances, and what their partners care about. Husbands were especially clueless, tending to underestimate how much women care about almost every financial issue, from investing and saving for retirement to paying off debt. A hundred years after Freud, and men still don't know what women want."

Some other fun facts from the Money survey:

Seven out of ten respondents said money causes more fights than sex or even in-laws.
Only 27 percent of men think their wives prioritize putting their assets in the "right investments." In reality, almost half of women responded that they actually do care -- almost equaling the percentage of men who say they care.
45 percent of men think it’s important to hoard cash in case of emergencies, while 67 percent of women think it’s vital.
In families where the woman is the primary breadwinner, 4 out of 10 wives control most of the investments. This is almost double the number of women who take the reins when the husband is the earner.

So what is happening? Are those 67 percent of women hoarding more cash because they have, historically, earned less than men? We hear over and over that women make 76 cents on every dollar earned by men. That statistic is somewhat open to question, partly because it fails to take into account critical differences in education, experience and, other factors that impact earning potential. A man and woman with identical backgrounds, education, and family dynamics will not automatically receive a 24-cents-on-the-dollar difference in pay. Disparity in earnings is a more complicated issue than can be captured in one statistic.

Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research calls the 76 cent figure "a good measure of inequality, not necessarily a measure of discrimination." In order to really identify what part of the wage gap is due to direct discrimination, all the other factors like performance, education and market forces need to play into the equation. The bottom line is that discrimination does prevent professional women from rising to equally high paying jobs of stature in the workplace. But the 76 cent figure, by being so sweeping and generic, doesn't always help clarify the problem of equal pay.

Go here to see 39 professions where women earn a higher paycheck.

Posted by on 03/14/06 at 3:14 PM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us

Comments

These are interesting questions. Do women hoard more cash because they have historically earned less money, or it is because they are by nature more cautious and men are more apt to take risks? I vote for the second explanation. A lot of women come from families in which money was hoarded, and a lot come from families in which money was freely spent. I still think that behavior is more motivated by family of origin than by anything else, so--using my theory, it should come out about equal. But there are other factors at play, and one of them is that women tend to be grounded in the "now," "at-home" issues of security and need. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.)

Women are ever-mindful of emergencies because they tend to be the hands-on responders to those emergencies. Women usually have more contact with sick children, sick parents, and sick in-laws. Women also tend to have more information about the cost of things. Please bear in mind that I say "tend to." There are exceptions, of course, and there will probably be more exceptions as time goes by.

Posted by: Diane on 03/14/06 at 6:36 PM

Of those 39 jobs, well more than half of them make less than $40k / year and 14 make below $30 k / year. The fact that women crossing guards make more money than male crossing guards is not helping the problem of women in poverty.

Many of the highest paying jobs listed have only tiny numbers of women. How many women legislators are there versus men? Their higher pay may speak to their tenacity and aggressiveness in breaking gender barriers. Women in highly male dominated fields have to be better than their male colleagues to succeed - so they are better and get paid more.

While it's true that the wage gap statistic doesn't paint a full picture, it's also true that wages tend to go up for a job as more men do it and tend to fall as more women do it. Work that is perceived as "female" is valued less.

Posted by: Les on 03/15/06 at 7:04 AM

Some feminists, if nothing else, are definitely consistent in their views of inequality. While it is perfectly okay for an American female to whine about being statistically "categorized" by a man, let a man say something like women are "by nature more cautious and men are more apt to take risks" and it would be better for that man if he had never been born.

I have been jailed for standing up for human rights and I am all in favor of women being treated fairly and equitably, but hey, how is okay for women to berate men while the opposite remains as being so poltically "incorrect"?

Posted by: Richard Aberdeen on 03/17/06 at 1:34 PM

Nothing is mentioned here about women who are not working outside of the home. I feel they tend to hoard more because they usually operate on such a tight budget that hoarding for emergencies and 'pin money' is a fact of life. They receive no benefits for their labor (no 401k, medical or retirement benefits) and the only social security they will receive is their husband's. Unfortunately these women live their "golden years" at or lower than poverty level.

Posted by: E. Baly on 03/19/06 at 5:20 AM

Veteran actor William Franklyn, known for voicing the 1960s Schweppes TV adverts, dies aged 81...

Posted by: Devon Damon on 11/27/06 at 9:28 AM