Bringing Home the Bacon: The Relationships among Breadwinner Role, Performance, and Pay

• Author: Colleen Flaherty Manchester,Patricia C. Dahm,Lisa M. Leslie
• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12225
• Published date: 01 January 2019

Bringing Home the Bacon: The Relationships

among Breadwinner Role, Performance, and Pay*

COLLEEN FLAHERTY MANCHESTER , LISA M. LESLIE and

PATRICIA C. DAHM

We evaluate the relationships among breadwinner role, performance, and pay.

Differences in pay are present despite limited differences in performance. We find

a pay premium for primary-breadwinner employees across gender, yet a pay pen-

alty for secondary-breadwinners employees only for women, suggesting an asym-

metric relationship among breadwinner role, gender, and pay.

Introduction

From 1960 to 1990, the proportion of two-earner households more than

doubled from 25 percent to nearly 60 percent (Wang, Parker, and Taylor

2013), while the number of households with a traditional division of labor

—a male sole earner and a female stay-at-home spouse—decreased. Since

1990, the proportion of two-earner households has remained relatively stable

(Wang, Parker, and Taylor 2013), yet household structure has continued to

evolve in at least two ways. First, the initial rise in two-earner households

frequently involved adding a second earner, often female (Percheski 2008),

who earned substantially less than her male partner. As a result, the num-

ber of earners in the household increased, but the household structure with

one primary breadwinner was preserved. Over time, two-earner households

have increasingly become dual-breadwinner households with two relatively

equivalent breadwinners, who both have significant human capital invest-

ments and earnings (Benson 2015; Costa and Kahn 2000). Second, gender

dynamics have changed over time such that women are increasingly likely

to outearn their male partners in two-earner households; such households

increased fourfold from 1960 to 2011 (Wang, Parker, and Taylor 2013). As

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. E-mail: cman-

ch@umn.edu; New York University, New York, New York. E-mail: lleslie@stern.nyu.edu; and California

Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California. E-mail: pdahm@calpoly.edu.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, DOI: 10.1111/irel.12225. Vol. 58, No. 1 (January 2019). ©2018 The Regents of

the Univers ity of Califo rnia Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

46

a result, men in partnered households are no longer the de facto primary

breadwinner.

1

These changes have amounted to an expansion in the set of breadwinner

roles employees occupy. While historically married men were primary bread-

winners and married women were either secondary breadwinners or did not

work outside the household, today both men and women in married or part-

nered households frequently occupy the following roles: primary-breadwinner

(i.e., spouse/partner is a secondary breadwinner or not employed), dual-bread-

winner (i.e., employee shares breadwinner role relatively equally with a

spouse/partner), and secondary-breadwinner (i.e., employee’s spouse/partner is

the primary breadwinner) employees.

In spite of this dramatic change in the household landscape, there remain

significant limitations in our understanding of how fulfilling different bread-

winning roles affects employees’work outcomes. Prior work suggests that

household type does indeed matter for employees’careers, with the most con-

sistent and widespread evidence pertaining to married men. Married men, pre-

viously considered a proxy for primary-breadwinner role, have higher pay and

promotion rates as compared to unmarried men (see Juhn and McCue [2017]

for a review). In addition, men who are the sole earner in a household earn

more and have better career trajectories than men in two-earner households

(Hotchkiss and Moore 1999; Landau and Arthur 1992; Pfeffer and Ross 1982;

Schneer and Reitman 1993, 2002; Stroh, Brett, and Reilly 1996). Although

prior research suggests that breadwinner role affects employee outcomes, cur-

rent understanding is incomplete for at least three reasons.

First, extant research does not adequately capture the types of breadwinner

roles employees frequently occupy in the current labor market. While being a

married man was previously a reasonable proxy for primary breadwinner role,

this is no longer the case. Likewise, research that differentiates sole- versus

two-earner households does not distinguish between two-earner households

that include a primary and a secondary breadwinner versus those that include

dual breadwinners with relatively equivalent human capital investments and

earnings. As a result, extant work does not provide insight into the full range

of breadwinning roles employees currently occupy.

Second, nearly all of these prior studies do not include measures of

employee performance, which precludes understanding of why breadwinning

role affects career outcomes. Theories of household specialization predict that

having a spouse/partner who specializes in fulfilling household responsibilities

1

We largely write in terms of mixed-sex partners and spouses in the paper, but these households, both

generally and in our sample, also include same-sex partners and spouses. We cannot distinguish between

same-sex or mixed-sex partners and spouses in our sample.

Breadwinner Role, Performance, and Pay /47

facilitates work performance (Becker 1985; Hersch and Stratton 2000; Kanter

1977; Pfeffer and Ross 1982), with the result that a pay premium for primary-

breadwinner employees is justified. Alternatively, the premium may instead be

driven by stereotypes (i.e., characteristics are assumed to apply uniformly and

often erroneously to all individuals in a group). For example, managers may

assume employees with a supporting spouse/partner are more likely to meet

the ideal worker norm of uncompromised commitment to their job as com-

pared to those without, resulting in a pay premium in spite of equivalent per-

formance (Acker 1990; Williams 2000). One of the only studies on household

type that incorporated performance found that performance differences

explained higher promotion rates and pay among married versus single men

(Korenman and Neumark 1991). Yet, as noted above, marital status is now a

poor proxy for breadwinning role. Knowing whether pay differences associated

with different breadwinner roles are driven by performance is critical for

understanding why breadwinning roles affect employee career outcomes.

Third, prior work on differences in career outcomes across household type

largely focuses on men. Gendered expectations around household responsibili-

ties (Hersch and Stratton 2000), as well as the gendered nature of ideal work-

ers (Acker 1990; Reid 2015; Williams 2000), raise the question as to whether

the effects of breadwinner role on career outcomes are contingent upon gender,

yet prior evidence is limited. Past studies tend to either evaluate the effect of

proxies for breadwinning role (e.g., marital status, or sole- versus two-earner

households) in samples of men only (Hotchkiss and Moore 1999; Korenman

and Neumark 1991; Pfeffer and Ross 1982; Stroh, Brett and Reilly 1996) or

are restricted in the conclusions they can draw about gender due to a limited

number of women who are the sole earner in their households (Landau and

Arthur 1992; Schneer and Reitman 1993, 2002). A recent exception is Budig

and Lim (2016), who found that both male and female primary earners, as

measured by work hours relative to one’s spouse, earn a pay premium when

compared to nonpartnered employees. However, the Budig and Lim study

lacked a direct measure of performance and used work hours to proxy for

breadwinner role.

The goal of the present research is to provide insight into unanswered ques-

tions regarding the effects of breadwinner role on employee outcomes. Draw-

ing on theories from economics, sociology, and social psychology, we develop

hypotheses regarding the effect of breadwinner role on employee performance

and pay. Specifically, based on theories of household specialization, we

hypothesize that primary-breadwinner employees will outperform employees in

other breadwinner roles, while the performance of secondary-breadwinner

employees will lag employees in other breadwinner roles. We expect that these

differences in performance will contribute to higher pay for primary-

48 / COLLEEN FLAHERTY MANCHESTER,LISA M. LESLIE AND PATRICIA C. DAHM