Money, Career & Gender Norms

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Money, Career & Gender Norms: Ask A Millennial

Women Are Increasingly Becoming Breadwinners. Here's What Modern Men Really Think Of It.

For most of recorded history, a "man" was largely defined as someone who provides. In a larger sense, it’s about having power. Control. Influence.
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As millennials, we’re very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your politics) to have borne witness to some momentous events in our lifetimes. We elected the first non-white president. Some parts of the world are beginning to grant non-heterosexual people the privilege to marry. Even the wacky weed is fully legal in some places, if that’s your thing. In addition (and perhaps least controversially), women have an unprecedented presence in the workplace. One consequence of this is that women are becoming the primary earners in their household at a staggering rate.

Why does that matter to millennials? It’s because we’ll be the last generation of men to remember a time when such circumstances were not only rare, but “wrong.” Not “wrong” in the way stealing is morally wrong, but more like the questionable, societally-imposed variety of wrong, such as seeing a man carrying a purse. AKA, something that makes some people feel uncomfortable for no logical reason. Something some people have decided is strange. 

The issue millennials face is that we're living through the time when a whole bunch of "wrong" things are suddenly not only OK, but also embraced. Change is happening. And since we're experiencing the transition between the world we “knew” and the world we now know to be true, we’re going to have to answer some tough questions regarding what exactly defines a man. For as much (justified) praise is heaped upon successful women, the question of “how do men now define their identity” is often overlooked.

I’ve written before that asking “what does it mean to be a man” is an asinine question, and that’s true — especially if you get at all philosophical about it. Even AskMen's tagline isn’t “be a man,” it’s “become a better man.” For most of recorded history, a "man" was largely defined as someone who provides. In a larger sense, it’s about having power. Control. Influence. When we look to see who’s in charge, we reflexively expect it to be a man. Within the confines of your own home, the easiest way to gain that control (and thus fulfill your "manly" obligation) is to be the one who brings home the bacon. If you paid for the house, it’s assumed that you get the final say over what goes on inside.

That’s a pretty convenient arrangement, when you think about it. We associate manhood with power, we associate power with money, and it just so happens that men have traditionally been the ones making the money. Make all the money (or at least most of it) and, boom, welcome to manhood. For most millennials, that was our reality growing up. Dad brought home the bacon and Mum cooked it. Even if Mum worked, it’s unlikely that her job was the primary source of household income or even contributed to it significantly. If Dad’s job moved, the family moved. If Mum’s job moved, she either found a new one or didn’t bother.

That is (if you hadn’t picked up on the gist of this article yet) changing, and rapidly. There was an article in the New York Post the other week, in fact, about how women are struggling to assume the role of primary breadwinner. Part of it is the pressure that comes with it, but hey — that’s what anyone asks for when they embark on a lucrative career path. The other part, though, is a little harder to sort out. In some households with female breadwinners, there’s a general feeling of unrest on the part of the men, which sometimes leads to friction. Most of the couples highlighted are older, outside the millennial generation. For those men, the status quo changed even more abruptly.


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