a two-career marriage. Only 29 percent of women surveyed named more psychological benefits, such as personal fulfillment or intellectual equality, as a major job perk (although well over half said they would work with or without financial need). When Catalyst asked husbands the same question about the benefits of work, men mirrored women's responses within 1 percentage point. One survey area where husbands and wives that I found to be interesting in this supposed era of the “Me” generation: Mothers were 20 percent more likely than fathers to "scale back career goals" and "step off the fast track at work."About half of all women who work full-time earn less than $25,000 annually, and 7 million women scrape by on the minimum wage (In These Times, 11/28/99). Certainly many women, especially those whose jobs entail a certain level of intellectual challenge and professional success, find independence and personal gratification in their careers. However, it is unlikely that many mothers in low-wage jobs, rarely benefiting from the health care and family-friendly benefits that women in corporate America receive, work outside the home simply for the love of it. Even for families that are not low-income, a second income often makes the difference between a family's financial growth and stagnation or worse. As research from the Economic Policy Institute illustrates, men's real wages have fallen since the 1970s as women's hourly wages have risen, making wives' added salaries increasingly important to family incomes over time (The State of Working America 2000-2001). According to EPI, middle-income families who saw their income rise by 13.5 percent between 1979 and 1998 would have seen their income drop by 0.7 percent without the addition of wives' wages. Routine household chores is one area that research consistently finds that husbands do not make equal contributions to. For example, one survey found that women did 77% of the cooking...
