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How To Achieve Income Inequality In The United States

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It was common in the early 20th century, dipped in the middle of the century and has sharply risen in recent years — a pattern that roughly mirrors income inequality in the United States, according to research by Robert Mare, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. People are now more likely to marry people with similar educational attainment — even after controlling for differences between men and women like the fact that women were once less likely to attend college. Even though the typical husband still makes more than his wife, the marital pay gap among opposite¬sex couples has shrunk significantly in the decades since women started entering the work force en masse. That’s up from 52 percent in 1970. In opposite¬sex marriages in which both spouses work some amount of time, 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands do, up from 23 percent in …show more content…

The marriage pay gap varies by education, profession and class. People were least likely to marry those with similar educational backgrounds around the 1950s, according to Mr. Mare’s research,when people married very young. Using census data from 1970 to 2000, they analyzed the choices people made in so ¬called marriage markets, based on age, education, race and where they lived. When such marriages do form, the women become more likely to seek jobs beneath their potential or to stop working entirely, and the marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Paradoxically, wives who earn more also do significantly more housework and child care than their husbands do, to make their husbands feel less threatened, the economists

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