Men earn more when wives stay home

[QuietWind]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8316386/

Married men earn more if wives do the chores
Study finds 'wage premium' for husbands of stay-at-home spouses

Updated: 10:42 a.m. ET June 22, 2005


LONDON - Married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework, according to a report on Wednesday from Britain’s Institute for Social and Economic Research.


Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.


“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labor economist, told Reuters.


(For complete story, see link above)

[varangian_guard]

reuters has made a logical fallacy in causality; more likely it's "women stay home when men earn more" not the other way around.

[QuietWind]

reuters has made a logical fallacy in causality; more likely it's "women stay home when men earn more" not the other way around.

If you read the article, though, it says that the earning more only applies in situations where the woman not only stays home but also does all the chores. It made a distinction between not only women who stay at home and those who go to work, but also between those who stay at home and do the chores and those who stay at home and do not do all the chores. How do you explain women staying home even when their husbands do not make more? Three percent more is not a huge deal, IMO. Even if the average income was upwards of around $60,000 a year, that means they are making less than $2,000 a year more, or approximately $150 more per month.