Women are making more money than their husbands – and men aren’t happy about it: study

Wealth is health – unless your wife earns more than you.

A recent study suggests that men who earn less than their wives are not as happy.

The study, published in The Economic Journal, found that when a woman earns more than her husband, there is a higher incidence of mental health problems for both spouses – but especially for the husband.

All over the world, there is a growing trend for the woman to be the main winner in a marriage, including celebrity couples such as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce or Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.

“The proportion of couples where the wife earns more than the husband is increasing globally,” the authors write.

“In both the United States and Sweden, it has increased by about 25% since the turn of the millennium.”

Even with the increasing number of women earning more than their husbands around the world, there hasn’t been much research on the mental implications of the issue.

Scientists from Durham University analyzed the link between marital income and mental health, looking at heterosexual couples in Sweden who married in 2021 and had an average age of 37.

Couples were followed either for a 10-year period or until they divorced, which happened to about 20% of the couples surveyed.

The researchers found that “crossing the threshold where the woman starts earning more significantly increases the probability of receiving a mental health diagnosis,” and the odds are higher for the man.

“In the most restrictive specification, the odds increase by approximately 8% for the entire sample and by 11% for men.”

The analysis also showed that mental health was positively related to their own and their spouse’s absolute income – but the relationship was negative when it came to the wife’s income alone.

“Mental health is a crucial outcome associated with a host of important economic and life outcomes,” the authors write. “In this study, I find tangible evidence of relative income in couples playing an important role in mental health outcomes, even in a seemingly more egalitarian society like Sweden.”

For men, the increase was mainly driven by substance use-related mental health diagnoses, while for women, neurotic and stress-related disorders.

However, the researchers did not investigate possible reasons that could lead to the findings.

Lead researcher Demid Getik cautioned that study results based on databases and registries do not reflect why individuals feel a certain way about a certain situation.

“It’s a bit difficult to speculate here,” Getik told MailOnline. “One weakness of register data is that it doesn’t tell us as much about people’s perception and attitudes as survey data could.”

Getik noted that based on previous literature, it seems like the reasoning is due to “the persistent preference for the male partner to earn more in a couple.”

“It is a little more difficult to say to what extent the preferences come from women or men”, he added. “What’s interesting though is that you still see this in a country like Sweden, which prides itself on gender equality.”