Struggling men may affect marriage prospects for non-college women

A rising concern in today’s society is how the challenges faced by men without college degrees affect the marriage prospects of women with similar educational backgrounds. As education plays an increasingly critical role in shaping economic opportunities, men grappling with unstable employment and financial insecurity may unintentionally shrink the pool of suitable partners for non-college-educated women seeking marriage.

Women End Up Taking More Than 50%

When men do badly in life in terms of money or education, women bear the brunt of it. Non-college women often end up doing more than their share, accounting for more than 50 percent, in a relationship. They get pregnant, raise the children, maintain the household, keep it together, and most of the time, work to bring in the income. Men may want to claim that they are supposed to be the breadwinners, and this rhetoric is endlessly repeated by our society.

Esteve et al. (2016) found in their analysis of 120 countries that women are more educated than their husbands and often serve as the primary breadwinners in their households. The fact that women end up with the additional duties is a simple statement of the fact that men who struggle rarely rise to the occasion, and women instead take it on themselves to overextend to pick up the slack. Why would a non-college woman want to marry a man like that, and then take on more than 50% of the burdens? She will have to double up for two.

Marriage Premiums in the workforce are exacerbating the situation

In practice, marriage involves a set of material and social processes through which many men, independent of their personal growth or change, are favored merely by virtue of being married.

In his 2020 study, The Male Marriage Premium: Selection, Productivity, or Employer Preferences?, Patrick McDonald found that married men in Switzerland earn 11% more than their single counterparts. This wage gap shrinks to 3-4% after adjusting for factors like selection and productivity, but it doesn’t disappear entirely.

The study also revealed a potential reason for this disparity: recruiters admitted they were more likely to offer higher wages or job interviews to married men. This suggests that some men might see marriage as a strategic move for career advancement.

Weaponized Incompetence

A man knows his partner sees the truth—he’s broke. Instead of stepping up, he leans on that fact as an excuse. He tells her, “I can’t afford it,” but deep down, what he really means is that he won’t afford it, he won’t try, and he won’t do it.

He banks on her compliance, knowing she will pick up the slack because she understands the financial strain. This becomes a subtle form of control: the woman shoulders the bills, the childcare, the housework, while the man hides behind the façade of helplessness.

Men Pull Women Down Instead of Lifting Them Up

Most of these women, non-college, step into adulthood with little or no serious job experience after high school graduation, and promptly become pregnant soon after. There is no opportunity to pursue gainful employment and accumulate a work history that will allow them to move into more independent and lucrative positions later. Therefore, caregiving becomes the primary focus.

Ehrlich, Möhring & Drobnič (2020) demonstrated that women who step back from their careers and work fewer hours due to family care reasons face a more challenging time returning to full-time work later in life.

Nearly 28 million employees in the United States are part-time, which is a concerning trend. As women are the majority of these part-time employees, it suggests that employers might be taking advantage of them. Recent analysis of Swedish college graduates reveals that women’s early-career salaries lag behind those of men, as women have been socialized to perceive their work as less valuable from the outset.

In case Infidelity Meets Financial Instability

In 2022, a research article published in Frontiers in Psychology examined men’s mating motivation and its impact on financial decision-making. In two experiments, the researchers observed that men whose mating motivation was activated were more likely to engage in financial risk-taking.

This was most pronounced in the case of men who had not previously been in a romantic relationship, where the relationship status priming had a significantly lower effect on them. The study’s authors noted that relationship inexperience served to increase financial risk-taking behavior as a means to heighten attractiveness, mirroring previous work in the field, including the “young male syndrome” theory, which posits that young men take a disproportionately high risk in order to compete with other potential mates.

Infidelity, which is more than certain to be part of the package, creates additional (hidden) spending and emotional labor, as financial instability (again, driven in large part by male partners’ activity) is not a stable foundation on which to build a family.

Self-Interest in Masculinity

Men are ego-centric, orbiting around women, but look deep into their core, and all you find is the man himself at the center. Even the so-called “woman chasers” are not really putting the woman at the center; their ego, the rush, the affirmation of being a man, that can attract women, and the like. A woman becomes the test or the trophy but never the purpose. In this way, then, the thing that men truly protect is not women but the fragile architecture of masculinity itself.

The advances of women over men due to more women than men being educated by far the most have led to many improvements in equality; however, even at its height, masculinity has ways to worm its way back into relevance. The old model of manhood, which involves providing, protecting, and dominating, still hovers in the air like a goalpost. When that goalpost collapses under the weight of women not being dependent, it’s self-interest that men often fall back on.

The new strategy is then to simply choose what will protect their pride in the present, at the expense of women having a greater share of the burden in the long term.

Fear of Emasculation and Breeding of Misogyny

A guy with less money might perceive himself as less masculine — it’s almost automatic in societies built on provider myths. Recent research sheds light on what happens next. A 2024 journal article by Burns & Paz Martín shows that men who feel nostalgia for traditional masculinity (when “men were men” and “women were women”) tend to also hold more misogynistic attitudes, especially toward women who break those traditional molds — those who work, who choose not to have kids, who prioritize independence.

Emasculation doesn’t go unnoticed. The emotional burden can force men into brittle positions. They push back against change, double down on control, and resent their loss of “traditional” roles. Refusing responsibility, or policing how a woman dresses/moves, serves a brittle ego more than it constrains her.

Generational Poverty vs Women’s Empowerment

Women provide for and shape the health of a family generation after generation. It is a woman who decides what and how to feed children, where to send children to school, which health services to provide, how to maintain order in the family, and keep it from falling apart.

However, the loss of social and economic power in the women’s community is not a purely private misfortune, as it leads to the distortion of the natural social order. The inability to enter the labor market, having an unfinished education or simply a lack of education, and a predisposition to early maternity – all of the above issues are the norm rather than the exception for an uneducated mother.

Additionally, she is compelled to work in low-paid and often temporary positions. She is highly vulnerable, and without a permanent job with a regular salary, she is the main caretaker in the family, but she does not have economic empowerment. These and many other social and economic disadvantages are a recipe for intergenerational poverty.

Why investing for retirement is so important for women (and how to do it)

Why investing for retirement is so important for women (and how to do it)

Retirement planning can be challenging, especially for women who face unique obstacles such as the wage gap, caregiving responsibilities, and a longer life expectancy. It’s essential for women to educate themselves on financial literacy and overcome the investing gap to achieve a comfortable and secure retirement. So, let’s talk about why investing for retirement is important for women and how to start on this journey towards financial freedom.