Salary gaps… never thought they were so wide!

[Donotfitin]

I always thought our marriage was fairly uncommon in terms of me being the main breadwinner and making 2x-3x as much as my husband

However apparently the average gap is £32k and apparently 23% of women are the main breadwinners!

So my husband was right after all!

AiBU for veins so surprised?

My husband earns 4x what I do and I work double the hours

he works in finance and has a lot of pressure

i work in emergency services and get a good wage in my opinion plus over time but the pay and hours are far worse

I would choose my job and day though as it’s a vocation

I am the breadwinner and earn £110k more than my husband

my best friend also considerably out-earns her husband. We are certainly the anomaly though in my experience

I also earn more just slightly.
This reminds me of an interesting piece i read on grazia
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/breadwinner-wives-invisible-load/
Breadwinning wives still tend to do more housework. Definitely tracks 🤔

Spot on for DH and I!

Very much the same at home. He was a pt SAHP and mostly cleaned the kitchen and then watched TV.

These days our house work is similar (but I don’t do much anyway!

I think those of us mums who have kept up their careers while having children had to be extremely driven and determined to make it all work so not surprised some of us managed to be successful in their jobs and you end up with that number of female breadwinners.

DH is older than me, working in a sector that generally pays more than mine and was already working when we met while I was still studying. It took me a good while - also because I was working mainly part time since having kids - but I am now out earning him (I work four days, he five but even in four days I earn more than he in five). Most of us mums are just used to having to work incredibly hard and that sometimes translates to higher earnings ( not always as some sectors have such low pay no matter how brilliant you are you will never outearn a mediocre man in a high-paying sector). Regardless how much we earn the mental load remains ours to carry though.

I earn £60k more than my DH.

I know in my friendship group of 6, 5 earn more than their DH (no idea how much) and in my peer group of 5 at work. All but 2 earn more than thier DH.

Not surprising! Myself and all my girlfriends are the breadwinners.

Agree with others that the 32k number might not tell you that much - unclear from the article whether it’s a mean or a median, plus it’s ‘a difference’ so will always be > 0. It’s possible for eg that in relationships where the woman earns more the difference is (making up numbers) on average ~8k, and in relationships where the man earns more the difference is on average ~40k (lots of women not working at all, lots of very very high earners skewing the data). That gives you an average of 32k difference if roughly a quarter of the time it’s a women earning more… (obviously all of this just ignores the existence of gay couples..)
TLDR: these stats alone don’t necessarily tell you that much!

This is a good point.

We have always closely leapfrogged each other up until a point before we had kids, where I burned out. But my husband was also on the point of burnout, and I made an ultimatum that he switched to a job with a better work-life balance before children (instead of 80h weeks and working on holidays).

We have planned our son, careers and house moves together. For a little while, the focus was on me requalifying in a sideways move with good long-term prospects (data and AI). Then he did some work on getting a big promotion. Now the focus is on me again to switch to self-employed to maximise income and improve our flexibility.