High Flying Women lie about Sex Too

What’s a girl to do? According to new research, men are more likely to be unfaithful if their wives are high-fliers – so maybe your marriage will be safer if you stay at home and bring up the children.

Except, unfortunately, that sounds like even less fun: although women who are financially dependent on their husbands are not likely to cheat, their highly paid spouses still tend to stray.

“At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners,” reckons Christin Munsch, author of The Effect of Relative Income Disparity on Infidelity for Men and Women. “At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating, like long working hours, [and] travel.”

It turns out that the best bet for women hoping to ensure their husbands’ fidelity is to make roughly 75 per cent of their partner’s earnings. I can see exactly why this would work: it’s enough to allow the woman to feel financially independent – and for her husband to understand that to be the case – but not enough for the man to feel that his masculinity is impugned.

Luckily, it is indeed often the case that husbands make a bit more than their working wives – a few years on what Americans call “the Mommy track” often depresses women’s earnings, even for couples with roughly parallel careers.

But these things are hard to plan, particularly since many of us meet our future spouses at university or in the first few years of our working lives. At that point, a decision that one or other partner will be the main breadwinner seems more straightforward.

Munsch’s assumption is that men’s confidence comes under threat if their wives earn substantially more then they do, whereas it is socially acceptable for women to be supported by their husbands. There is doubtless a lot of truth to that – but there may be other explanations for her results.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tracycorrigan/7951397/High-flying-women-lie-about-sex-too.html