4 out of 10 households have female breadwinner, all male panel on Fox freaks out

[John Dibble]

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/29/breadwinner-moms/

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Fox freaks out...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kORINpVUEtE

[All Along The Watchtower]

"Traditional family values."

Nevermind the fact that women have been working in America since...well, since a long, long time ago. And the percentage of women working increased throughout the 1950s (the "Golden Years" of cultural conservatism, as told by Leave it to Beaver ).

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Some of that reaction is just nuts, but keep in mind - over half of these female breadwinners are single mothers, and a large part of the remainder are families where a man has lost his job.  Neither are great news.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

I had to stop watching halfway through. 

[Link]

Uumm... This was on Fox BUSINESS channel.  They get something like 60,000 viewers TOTAL.  No one saw this.

[King]

FOX Business channel is the worst.  It seems to only exist to make crazed viral videos.

[Dave from Michigan]

Hardly a "freak out". The numbers don't surprise me though I immediately thought of single moms and there is a lot of them. I have no problem with women working or being the "breadwinner" but all these single moms with kids and no fathers is a problem. Yes there were some comments that were wrong and cringe worthy, but just because it is fox new doesn't mean it's all wrong. I know people love to take shots at Fox news.

[Indy Texas]

"Traditional family values."

Nevermind the fact that women have been working in America since...well, since a long, long time ago. And the percentage of women working increased throughout the 1950s (the "Golden Years" of cultural conservatism, as told by Leave it to Beaver ).

People on both the left and the right refuse to acknowledge how much of an aberration the 1950s were. Other than the period from the 1870s to the 1970s, it has always been normal in Western societies for women to hold paying jobs. And even during the period from the "Separate Spheres" Victorian era to the Leave it to Beaver days, the difference was mainly seen in middle-class homes (rather than poor homes, where women have always worked, and rich homes where women had never worked up to that point). Women have been cooks, bakers, seamstresses, midwives, nurses, and teachers throughout history.

Conservatives refuse to acknowledge that this is far more socially normal than they perceive it to be. Liberals refuse to acknowledge that a factory worker providing a middle-class life for a wife and three kids on his salary alone is also not normal, unless they want to bomb every other developed country to rubble to recreate a post-WWII environment (and do that every 30 years or so). To quote Brink Lindsey, conservatives want to live in the Eisenhower Era, liberals just want to work there. We can't do either one.

[Mr. Morden]

Out of curiosity on this statistic, what if you were to take single parents out of consideration, and just focus on families with both a mom and a dad?  Of those, what %age have the woman earning more $ than the man?

[Del Tachi]

"Dissolving society"?

I think that they are trying to bring-out the fact that SO MANY households are now single-parent households, and that single-parent households (statistically) are more likely to produce "sub-standard" members of society.

Now, I will have to break with these FOX crazies on a lot of what they bring up in this clip...but I can see why one would see this statistic as troubling if framed in the above context. 

[jaichind]

Out of curiosity on this statistic, what if you were to take single parents out of consideration, and just focus on families with both a mom and a dad?  Of those, what %age have the woman earning more $ than the man?

Reading

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/01/dual-earner-couples-recession/1957621/

it says "Wives in dual-earner couples are contributing a greater share of the couple's total earnings, 40% in 2011, up from 38% in 2006. And, more wives in 2011 were out-earning their husbands. The report considers wives to earn more than husbands if they contribute at least 60% of the couple's earnings. In that five-year period, the percentage of wives earning a greater share of income increased from 13% to 16% of married couples."

Of course some of this is where the husband is unemployed.  I expect this percentage to rise but not that much.  What I see a lot in my social circles is where a women makes a lot they are married to men that make even more.  This is one of the reasons that household income inequity will persist.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course the reality is that the 1950s were nothing like the 1950s as subsequently imagined in later decades; it was actually a time of tremendous social change, greater than anything we're seeing at present. Ordinary people with money. Admittedly the stereotype is truer of America than elsewhere, but it's still bollocks.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Of course the reality is that the 1950s were nothing like the 1950s as subsequently imagined in later decades; it was actually a time of tremendous social change, greater than anything we're seeing at present. Ordinary people with money. Admittedly the stereotype is truer of America than elsewhere, but it's still bollocks.

Indeed. Of course, a lot of the stereotypes of American culture in the 1950s have their roots in the Cold War and McCarthyism (which was a phenomenon that was much, much more than the man himself).

Re: the social change...a great example of that can be seen in the mass suburbanization of "middle-class" white Americans (as well as the whole concept of a "middle-class" of the size and scope that would develop in America during that time). Factory workers, machinists, business managers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, small business owners, teachers and civil servants-all of these and more lived side-by-side in affordable suburban homes with plenty of space and privacy (which was previously a luxury of the wealthy). And despite the diversity of occupations and social classes, the overall affluence, significant upward social mobility, and similar lifestyles of suburbanites in general tended to make class distinctions all the more ambiguous.

[King]

Technically, separated parents would produce a 50-50 result in "who is the head of your household" question as they'd be asked separately by the pollster.  So 60-40 men still means there's a lot of traditional households out there.

[Mr. Morden]

Technically, separated parents would produce a 50-50 result in "who is the head of your household" question as they'd be asked separately by the pollster.  So 60-40 men still means there's a lot of traditional households out there.

Except I thought it was 40% of households *with children*.  In cases where both parents are alive but split, the mother presumably has custody of the kids in more cases than not.  And so the father, living on his own and able to see the kids on weekends or whatever, wouldn't be counted as a "household with children".

But it sounds like, from what jaichind posted, only 16% of married couples with kids are in a situation where the mother out-earns the father?  And it was 13% five years ago, so it's increasing, but not at an extremely fast rate.  So yeah, the number of households with kids where the woman out-earns the man really doesn't seem to be that high to me.  All this study reminds us of is that there are a lot of single mothers out there.

[BluegrassBlueVote]

"When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart."

That's the War on Women right there.

[PJ]

They claim to be pro-science but they deny that we should evolve away from oppresing one gender. And I hardly see how using other animals is a good example. If he is suggesting that animals are a model of how we should live, he's crazy. We obviously shouldn't live like Polar Bears, when the females would still be single moms, ironically, and the males would go around by themselves and attack other young Polar Bears. I'm pretty sure that's not the right wing extremist idea of a perfect society and it shows how hypocritical and ignorant to science they really are.

[King]

Yeah, there's a ton of species where this "science" like all Teabagger "science" is not true.  Most cats are female dominant.  In primates, our close relatives the bonobos are as well.

[Dave from Michigan]

People seem to be focusing on the bad parts of this video but there were some things where they made a good point on, like single mothers and kids with no fathers is not a good thing.

[Antonio the Sixth]

People seem to be focusing on the bad parts of this video but there were some things where they made a good point on, like single mothers and kids with no fathers is not a good thing.

Single parents is not a good thing. This whole rant is based on a gender distinction which has absolutely no rational basis.

[Lief 🗽]

"When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart."

That's the War on Women right there.

We should base our society on bees. Women in all the places of power and doing all the important jobs, with a handful of otherwise-useless men kept around purely for breeding purposes. Surely Erick Erickson would support this; it's simple science.

[Middle-aged Europe]

It's the end of civilization as we know it!

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Of course the reality is that the 1950s were nothing like the 1950s as subsequently imagined in later decades; it was actually a time of tremendous social change, greater than anything we're seeing at present. Ordinary people with money. Admittedly the stereotype is truer of America than elsewhere, but it's still bollocks.

Connected to things I was saying in the other thread this, so I will add: Much less intelligently stagnant than now as well.

[DC Al Fine]

"Dissolving society"?

I think that they are trying to bring-out the fact that SO MANY households are now single-parent households, and that single-parent households (statistically) are more likely to produce "sub-standard" members of society. 

[Blue3]

"Dissolving society"?

I think that they are trying to bring-out the fact that SO MANY households are now single-parent households, and that single-parent households (statistically) are more likely to produce "sub-standard" members of society. 

No. He talked about how "science" proved that females are usually inferior and submissive to males, but now they're not anymore in the US.

"Society" is an abstract concept. Banning slavery, discrimination, etc. has dissolved the then-modern society too. And we are much better off for it.

And I know single-parent households who do much better than dual-parent households. When 2 people in a negative/dysfunctional relationship are together in a house with kids, it tends to hurt those kids more.