49% of Moms Are Breadwinners

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Women still only earn $0.78 for every dollar a man makes in the United States, but nearly half of all U.S. mothers are either the primary breadwinner or “on par financially with their significant other,” according to the new study “The Breadwinner PheMOMenon.” This is a significant leap from just last year, when only 40 percent of working moms were the major earner in their household, according to the Pew Research Center. “I was really surprised at the pace of how this is happening,” Kelley Skoloda, partner and director of Ketchum’s Global Brand Marketing Practice, tells Yahoo Parenting. “But the research says that our perception of ourselves and our lives hasn’t caught up with the tremendous and rapid progress we are making.”

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Skoloda, who worked with media-platform Blogher to conduct the report, is referring to the study’s somewhat less encouraging finding: that the majority of female breadwinners report their career hasn’t given them a greater sense of purpose, and they don’t feel in control of their destinies. In fact, 44 percent of those breadwinners say they are more stressed today than they were five years ago. “Most people think money equals control and purpose, but that hasn’t happened with moms,” Skoloda says. Moms still feel the pressure to have a perfect marriage, raise well-adjusted children, and be in good health, Skoloda says, and those priorities are weighing on women who feel like they can’t do it all.

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Jocelyn Elise Crowley, professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University and author of Mothers Unite!: Organizing for Workplace Flexibility and the Transformation of Family Life, says she’s not surprised that women’s happiness hasn’t increased with their financial contributions to the household. “Women feel even greater pressure — they are working more hours than ever before, and still trying to maintain the hours devoted to their children each week,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “So now, not only do they have to keep their kids in all the activities they’ve signed up for and take care of them in an extensive way, they have to bring home the bacon, too.”

The one place that women have lightened up, according to the study, is housework. Nearly half of the moms surveyed have given up on the idea that they need to keep a perfect home, according to the research. “When women think about work, children, and keeping house, chores go by the wayside,” Crowley says.

That more and more moms are breadwinners speaks to the trend of workplaces affording moms more options. “It’s much more societally acceptable for mothers to work outside the home, even if the kids are small,” she says. “In many cases, if a mother is from a working class or poor background, she doesn’t have a choice. But for middle class women, companies are offering more flexible work options like job sharing or telecommuting.”

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Breadwinners or not, mothers are still doing more than fathers, Crowley says. “Men have increased their contributions to the household in terms of childcare, but they’re still lagging behind women,” she says. Fixing that could be the solution to the stress problem. “To the extent fathers can become more involved and take over some of the duties mothers have been doing, that will lead to happier families overall.”