According to a report released by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of households in the United States have mothers as the sole bread earners of the family.
With modern times, women have become more independent and have started taking up jobs outside of handling household activities. A new report released by the Pew Research Center, Wednesday suggests that 40 percent of the U.S. households have mothers as the sole or primary bread earners of the family, indicating that 4 in every 10 households have women as the breadwinners of the families.
The research analyzed the changing traditional gender roles and family life over the last few decades. Authors of the research also found that women who out-earn their husbands rose from 4 percent in 1960 to 15 percent in 2011. In the same period, single mothers who are the sole bread providers of the family rose from 7 percent to 25 percent.
"The decade of the 2000s witnessed the most rapid change in the percentage of married mothers earning more than their husbands of any decade since 1960," said Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist who studies gender and family trends. "This reflects the larger job losses experienced by men at the beginning of the Great Recession. Also, some women decided to work more hours or seek better jobs in response to their husbands' job loss, potential loss or declining wages."
However, the Pew report also suggests that Americans are not very positively receptive of working mothers. Three- fourth of the participants who took part in the research said that such women find it difficult to raise children. Also half of the research participants felt that women working outside the home tend to have bad marriages as well.
Half of the participants also felt that it would be better if women stayed home to raise the kids and only 8 percent of the participants felt that men should stay home and raise the children while women could go out and work.
Contrary to this opinion, other polls conducted during the research suggested that 80 percent of Americans don't think mothers should return to a traditional 1950s middle-class housewife role.
"The public is really of two minds," said Kim Parker, one of the report's authors. Traditional gender roles "are a deeply ingrained set of beliefs. It will take a while for those views to catch up with the reality of the way people are living today."
