Giving Compass' Take:

• Pavithra Mohan reports that female breadwinners are becoming more common, but are still not seen as normal. She reveals how couples cope with the awkwardness created by the income disparity. 

• What factors create awkwardness and discomfort in this situation? How can visibility and representation start to reduce stigma around female breadwinner households? 

• Learn how donors can help work toward gender equality. 

In 2018, most women do not earn more than their male partners. The reasons for that are manifold: There’s the pay gap, which hurts women more in industries that pay more handsomely. Of the 12% of workers in the U.S. who earn more than $100,000, only 27% are women, according to a 2018 study by Georgetown University. Generally, women are more likely to work in sectors that don’t pay as well (or looked at another way, fields end up paying less when mostly women work in them). And for women of color, pay is even lower across the board.

That said, the numbers have crept up, and according to a recent paper from the Census Bureau, women reportedly now earn more than their male partners in 23% of couples. But because for all of women’s history in the workforce, they have earned a fraction of their male partners, and when women do manage to snag a higher salary, it can still be awkward or uncomfortable—sometimes for both parties.

The paper found that in marriages where women earned more, both people lied about their salaries when reporting them for the census. Women said they earned less than they actually did, and men said they earned more. (“Manning up and womaning down,” as the paper dubbed it.) When women outearned their partners, they were more likely to be well-educated and were outliers in that they made more than double the salary of women who earned less than their husbands; age and location did not seem to influence the occurrence of couples in which the woman earned more.

Read the full article about female breadwinners by Pavithra Mohan at FastCompany.