Men! Leave those dishes. You will earn more lolly if the wife washes them.

The “longitudinal data researchers” at Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research have claimed (PDF) that married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework.

These extraordinary and, if you are a lazy buzzard around the house like me, extraordinarily welcome findings are reported by Reuters like this:-

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.

“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labour economist, told Reuters.

“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.

Taylor and Bardasi analysed the hourly wages of 3,500 men who have been interviewed annually since 1991 as part of the British Household Panel Survey.

“We looked at all types of jobs from unskilled up to managers and professionals,” Taylor said.

Bliss. Best excuse I’ve come across in damned nearly thirty years of married life.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, June 22, 2005 at 05:14 PM in Feminism
Comments (4) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Mrs. Blessed on June 23, 2005, 05:14 PM | #

I am always amused when people rediscover that division of labor is actually efficient. I blogged about this last September when Fortune wrote an article on this subject.

Posted by jonjayray on June 24, 2005, 10:22 PM | #

David
I think your American readers might have taken a while to fifure out that “lolly” is English slang for money. Hence only one comment?

Posted by jonjayray on June 24, 2005, 10:23 PM | #

That should have been “figure out”

Posted by Guessedworker on June 25, 2005, 05:40 AM | #

Oh dear. You’re right. Does that mean they all thought I was proposing a strategy of laziness as a route to the marital bed?

Hey, I wonder if that

would work, too.

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