Women are making more money. Why are they still doing everything else?

There’s a piece in The Cut titled, “Call Her Mommy” about young women who out-earn their boyfriends and are getting a little tired of it.

These women are paying for dates, sure. But they’re also sending their boyfriends job listings and editing their résumés. They’re planning the trips, remembering the birthdays, initiating the conversations about where this was going and what the next five years might look like. One woman described running what seemed like a one-person career services company for a man who did not appear to be applying to anything.

There’s been a lot heterosexual discourse that has taken over the internet over the past few years. Women complain that men don’t plan anything, don’t know how to clean, don’t have ambition, don’t remember birthdays, don’t make reservations and have made “having a job” their single contribution to the household. Even though women also … have a job.

Men complain that women are expecting too much.

I have no desire to referee heterosexuality. Godspeed to everybody involved. But I do think the argument is much more interesting when you look at it economically.

For most of modern American history, heterosexual relationships ran on a fairly explicit trade. The man earned the money and the woman maintained the home, raised the children, managed the social calendar, cooked the food, remembered everyone’s doctor’s appointments, and did the thousand other tasks required to keep a family functioning.

This was not a very chill nor fair arrangement for women. It financially trapped generations of women inside bad marriages and treated an enormous amount of female labor as though it had no economic value. But it was a legible one, in a way. Everybody “knew” what they were supposed to be doing.

Then women started earning their own money and the financial side of the deal changed dramatically. The rest of it did not change nearly as fast.

And I think a lot of what gets read as women suddenly having impossibly high standards is really frustration with that gap. Women increasingly don’t need a man to financially provide for them. They do, however, want someone who contributes something meaningful to the life they’re building.

The question underneath all of this is pretty simple: If I’m earning the money and planning the future and managing the house and doing the emotional labor, what exactly is your job here?

Women got the breadwinner role and kept the housework

Women have made real gains, particularly educated urban women in their twenties and early thirties. In 2025, 49.6% of employed women over 25 held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 41.7% of employed men. Young women ages 25 to 34 are earning about 95 cents for every dollar earned by men, much closer to parity than the workforce overall. And recent job growth has been concentrated in sectors like health care and education, while several traditionally male-dominated industries have contracted.1

So we now have a lot of young women entering relationships with equal or greater financial power while still carrying expectations inherited from an economy where they had almost none.

If household labor worked like a simple economic model, earning more money should give you some leverage to do less of everything else.

This does not appear to be how heterosexuality works.

A 2025 NBER paper (with the incredible title “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too”) found that female breadwinners performed more home production than their male partners, particularly cooking and cleaning. Pew found something similar: In marriages where wives were the primary earners, women worked more paid hours than their husbands but also did more caregiving and more housework. Their husbands, meanwhile, got about nine additional hours of leisure per week.

Which maybe explains where the resentment is coming from. These women are earning more and planning more and worrying more and initiating more, and they’re tired.

Ambition stopped being aspirational

I notice pretty consistently that the average woman I talk to seems more ambitious, and more anxious about her future, than the average man. I think part of that is that a lot of women can’t really afford not to be.

For women, earning money has always carried a meaning beyond consumption or status. It's protection. The goal is to earn and save enough that you never have to stay somewhere because you can't afford to leave. That you have autonomy your mother or grandmother didn't. Some of the current focus on financial independence is aspiration, and some of it is just the accumulated knowledge that dependence has historically been a bad bet for women.

The economy has made this worse. Housing, health care, education, retirement, child care—none of it is affordable without steady income growth and a lot of forward planning. Ambition has become more about keeping your life from becoming more precarious, which is a very different emotional relationship to have with your own drive.

Plus, the earning power a lot of women have right now is temporary. The earnings gap increases with age, and it widens dramatically with motherhood. A 29-year-old woman aggressively building her career may therefore have a very rational sense that this is the period when she needs to accumulate as much economic power as possible.

Her boyfriend saying, “I’m sure it will all work out,” may genuinely believe that, but she’s hearing something very different:

If it doesn’t, you’re going to be the one who figures it out.

Men are dealing with a broken bargain too

Did all men wake up and decide to become useless? Maybe a few (I’ve met some of them). But the economy hasn’t been exactly kind to men either.

Men are dealing with the same high cost of living, impossible housing market and unstable labor market everyone else is. Some traditional male paths into economic stability have weakened. Labor-force participation among men has declined substantially over the long term, and recent job growth has been unusually concentrated in sectors like health care that employ more women.

At the same time, men have inherited a very narrow definition of what successful masculinity was supposed to look like. Provide.

Male economic value and male social value are often tightly connected. Now that relationship is weaker, and culturally we haven’t done a particularly good job replacing it with anything else.

Caregiving is still frequently treated as feminine, domestic work doesn’t carry much status. Emotional competence is rarely presented to boys as a serious contribution to a future household.

Many of the problems men are facing are therefore downstream of the same patriarchal bargain that constrained women. Patriarchy gave men more economic power, but it also gave them an incredibly narrow way to prove their worth.

Shame is a pretty predictable response here. Sure, some men adapt and become stay-at-home dads and become the person making dinner or remembering the pediatrician appointment or holding things together during a difficult year. Others lash out and blame women instead of the system that created these issues in the first place.

But I would argue many men have lapsed into a form of learned helplessness, experiencing the same financial nihilism everyone else is, and where a lot of women responded with hyper-independence, responding with apathy.

Many of the women in the Cut article weren’t upset that their boyfriends didn’t make money. They’re upset that their boyfriends don’t do anything.

What this does to how women handle money

Eventually this shows up in the actual financial decisions people make. If you keep learning that depending on someone creates more work for you, the logical move is to stop depending on people.

Maybe you don’t combine bank accounts with your partner, or insist on a prenup, or delay things like marriage or having children until you (and you alone) feel “financially ready”. Some of this may be a solid financial choice. But some of it is self-insurance against the relationship itself, which is a different thing, and it tends to calcify. You end up financially resilient and also fairly convinced that needing anyone is a risk you can't take.

Money also starts carrying an additional emotional meaning that isn’t really about money. If one person always pays, always plans, always remembers and always anticipates, resentment may attach itself to the bill even if the bill isn’t the problem.

It turns money into a proxy for love. Do you value me, or do you value everything my competence does for you?

The internet is not helping

Young women absorb an incoherent set of messages about money and romance online: be financially independent, never depend on a man, refuse 50/50 relationships, date a provider, embrace the soft life, get a prenup, and also maybe consider becoming a tradwife.

These look contradictory but they’re mostly responses to the same fear, which is: what happens if I contribute equally financially but stay unequal everywhere else?

The endless discourse about who pays for the first date is a crude proxy for a much bigger calculation, one that includes beauty labor, emotional labor, domestic work, pregnancy, caregiving, and career sacrifice (fun first date topic!).

Few people are actually arguing about $60 worth of pasta. They’re trying to use one observable financial behavior to predict an entire future relationship, measuring ambition, generosity, reciprocity, etc.

All totally normal things to determine over a bowl of rigatoni.

Money becomes the stand-in because it’s one of the few forms of contribution that’s easy to measure. But of course, a partnership contains a lot of things that are much harder to measure than how much money you make.

So what would actually help?

I don’t think the answer is (always) finding a man who earns more. I think it’s changing what we’re actually measuring.

• Stop evaluating contribution through salary alone. Someone can be deeply ambitious about things that don’t produce income. And someone can make a lot of money while contributing almost nothing to the actual functioning of a partnership. If you're using income as a shorthand for whether someone's going to show up, you're going to be wrong a lot.
• Fair doesn’t mean 50/50. A perfectly split check can coexist with a wildly lopsided relationship. Ask instead: Is this this person carrying their share of the life? Aka the paid work and the domestic labor and the caregiving and the planning and the admin and the emotional support and whatever career sacrifices are getting made.
• Potential is not a contribution. Women get encouraged to evaluate men generously: focus on who he could become, he’s still figuring it out, help him get there. But potential is not an asset. You can support someone without becoming his career coach, therapist, mother, and revolving line of credit. Is he driving his own development or letting your belief in him do the work instead?
• Caring about money doesn't make you shallow. A lot of women worry that paying attention to a partner’s debt or earnings or work habits is materialistic. It isn’t. Money is just where the abstract stuff becomes concrete: A conversation about money is also a conversation about time, risk, responsibility, kids, freedom, and whose life gets prioritized when there isn’t enough to go around.

Financial independence gave women the ability to survive outside a relationship, but survival was never supposed to be the destination.

What I personally want (and what I think a lot of women want) isn’t a return to dependence, and it isn’t permanent self-protection either. It’s the kind of interdependence where nobody has to become the other person’s mother in order to feel safe.

1

None of this means women have “won” the economy. They still earn less overall and remain underrepresented at the very top of many industries. Childbirth continues to have a much larger effect on women’s careers than men’s. The wage gap gets significantly wider after 35, right around the period when family formation starts reshaping people’s working lives.