Men and women BOTH lie about their salaries when wives earn more

When do spouses lie about money? When the wife earns more than her husband, according to a new report.

If the woman in a relationship is the major breadwinner, husbands tend claim they make more than they actually do and wives under report their own earnings, according to new research by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Census officials compared responses to their own surveys with actual IRS filing data and found the reported incomes consistently did not match up.

Women’s contribution to the household income has risen since 1970, reaching 36 percent in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Experts at the Census Bureau attribute the discrepancies to societal expectations around traditional gender roles.

‘We made a critical finding that adds to the understanding of gender norms and the quality of income statistics, in particular wage gaps among different-sex married couples,’ said Marta Murray-Close, economist at the Census Bureau and coauthor of the study.

Husbands would report earnings that are 2.9 percentage points higher, on average, than reality.

Wives also tended to overstate their husband’s earnings while devaluing their own incomes.

However, wives tended to overstate their husband’s income more than men, while husbands typically devalued their wives’ income more than the women themselves.

‘In other words, survey reports of earnings are more heavily influenced by gender norms when earnings are reported by a person’s spouse,’ the report said.

For example, in a household where a husband made 30,000, he would tell the Census Bureau he earned $30,870.

The gap is 1.5 percentage points lower for wives who make more than their husbands: If the same man’s wife earns $40,000, on average, the husband would report her earnings as $39,400, or $600 less than she actually earned.

So the overall gap for between the household’s actual earnings and reported earnings would be $300 more than reality.

‘Wage and earnings data underlie a majority of federal statistics on income, inequality and poverty, and are critical for understanding the pulse of the nation and overall well-being of individuals in society,’ said Bruce Meyer, economist at the Census Bureau and McCormick Foundation Professor at the University of Chicago Harris Public Policy School.

The proportion of wives earning more than their husbands has grown in recent decades, with 28 percent of working wives earning more than their husbands in 2017 (the most recent data available), compared to 18 percent in 1987, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.



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