It Costs to Work!
“I DIDN’T want my wife to work,” a husband admitted. “But when ‘ends aren’t meeting,’ you have to compromise. So she started working, and that’s made things a little easier.”
Throughout the world couples are saying that it is difficult to live on one income. In Australia, France, and Sweden the cost of food and housing virtually doubled between 1975 and 1982. In the United States the cost of feeding a family of four rose from about $67 a week in 1975 to over $100 in 1983! The cost of owning and operating an automobile in the United States nearly tripled between 1970 and 1981.
On and on the dreary statistics go. And when salaries do not keep up with inflation (as is often the case), couples may feel that they have but one alternative: Have the wife get a job. Best-selling author and social analyst John Naisbitt claims that if present trends continue, “85 percent of American women will be working” by the year 2000.
All too often, though, a second income falls short of being a financial panacea. For one thing, women are generally paid much less than men are.a True, some struggling couples welcome whatever the wife can earn. However, the authors of Making It Together as a Two-Career Couple further tell us: “One of the cold facts of life that many dual-career couples fail to comprehend is that it costs money to earn money. . . . Unless they are aware of this hard reality, couples tend to hold unrealistic expectations about the amount of disposable income they will have when both are working.”
So subtract from a woman’s wage income taxes, child-care costs, food-budget increases (two-income couples rarely have time to bargain-shop and often eat either restaurant or convenience foods), transportation, clothing, and miscellaneous expenses—and there often isn’t that much left from the wife’s salary. That’s why Joanne, a bilingual secretary and translator, quit her job. She explains: “My husband and I both . . . figured out that it would hardly be worth it.”
Families are finding out that a wife’s salary also costs in other ways. And some wonder if it is worth it.
[Footnotes]
a In the United States the average woman earns 59 percent of the average man’s salary. In Japan women make up 34 percent of the work force, yet a woman earns roughly 50 percent of what a man earns. Even in Sweden, which has “the nearest approximation to sexual equality in wages in the world,” women earn about 80 percent of what men do.