Class, Race, and the Spousal Income Gap

Abstract

The literature on gender economics has largely ignored the striking variation of the gender income gap across socioeconomic classes and racial and ethnic groups. Our article reports the effects of family income, educational attainment, and race-ethnicity on the ratio of the individual incomes of husbands and wives, the spousal gap, in the United States, using regression analysis on the PUMS data. We find that the higher the family income and the educational gap between husbands and wives, the larger the spousal gap. Non-White husbands (especially Blacks) are associated with significantly lower spousal gaps. Conditions shaping wives' choices --especially in relation to allocating more or less labor to their homes—have a larger impact on the spousal gap than those shaping husbands’ choices. This underscores the importance of industrial and occupational desegregation, antidiscrimination in the workplace, and the provision of services that relieve wives from domestic labor in improving gender equity.