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Survey: Women rule at home

By: Adam Crisp
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Richard Morin

Women still don’t earn as much as men, but at home they — not their husbands or boyfriends — are deciding when, where and how much to spend.

That’s the finding of a new Pew Research Center study.

Among 1,260 couples surveyed, 43 percent said women make most of the decisions in four key areas: shared weekend activities, big household purchases, managing household finances and controlling the TV remote control.

Thirty-one percent of respondents said they make those decisions together, and the remaining 26 percent said the man in the household makes most of those decisions. Pew researchers surveyed both married couples and unmarried, cohabitating couples.

“In my relationship, I’m the extrovert, so I’m definitely the one making the decisions,” said Tiffanie Campbell, 24, a Chattanooga marketing executive who lives with her boyfriend, Mike Robinson, 23. “I don’t necessarily fight for what I want to do, but Mike is just really laid back, and I’m a planner.”

Miss Campbell said most of her friends mirror that pattern, where the women plan most of the couple’s activities and at the very least the women initiate discussion on big-ticket purchases and expenditures.

Richard Morin, the study’s lead author, said there are no historical studies to compare the survey results with, so Pew researchers cannot say whether female-dominated decision making is a new phenomena.

“We do know increasingly men are doing more around the house with household tasks,” he said. “The key question is, and the one I’d really like to answer is, does that translate to a larger role in decision making?”

Terran Anderson, 23, and her husband Matt, 24, have been married 8 months, and though the couple admits she makes most of the decisions, Mr. Anderson said the division is about 60 percent/ 40 percent. Ms. Anderson manages the checkbook, but there’s plenty of discussion on how they spend their money.

The couple said both their parents’ homes were also female-dominated.

“In my family what the women says goes, and the men just need to sort of follow along,” Ms. Anderson said.

A generation before that, things were different.

“Back in the 1950s, women didn’t make financial decisions, and we didn’t do a lot of the going out with friends and things like my children do,” said 72-year-old Pamela Greesome, who stopped in Chattanooga on a multistate recreational vehicle tour with her husband, Albert, 74.

For most of their 50-year marriage, Mr. Greesome called the shots. Over time, however, that’s shifted.

“That’s changed in the years since our kids moved out of the house,” Mrs. Greesome aid. “But even when he made the decisions, it wasn’t as if I was upset by that.”

Mr. Morin said that illustrates a key study finding. One partner making most of the decisions doesn’t necessarily signal that the other has taken on a submissive role, he said.

“There’s no evidence that either party — the women or the men — when they aren’t making most of the decisions, that they are somehow aggrieved,” Mr. Morin said. “In fact, we found that most of the survey participants were fine with whatever role they had.”

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