Social relationships are so complex and complicated that it is not surprising that they are the focus of many studies. In this case, I would like to comment on a couple of recent works that focus on one of the psychological factors that come into play in relationships between men and women.
Apparently, Men feel uncomfortable when they are with more ambitious and “successful” women (work or social) than them.
The “romantic penalty” suffered by ambitious women is not a new issue. There are quite a few studies related to it, although these two new works reinforce this concept.
The first, carried out in the United States, shows How single women reduce their ambitions in public while the second, carried out in Sweden, reveals a real consequence of ambitions in marriages: the increase in divorces
Single women hide their ambitions
The study carried out by Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara and Amanda Pallais, three American economists, consisted first of all of offering a questionnaire to be filled out by a group of new students for a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA), as part of their initiation. in it.
The questionnaire contained questions about job preferences and personality traits one must have to run a company. But there were two types of questionnaire that only differed in the use of a single phrase: In some cases it was indicated that the results were completely anonymous ; and in others that the answers were going to be made public and that the name had to be indicated.
The results were not delayed. When looking at the private responses between single, engaged women and men, there were no significant differences. But things were not the same in the public ones.
While women with a partner and men maintained the same response as the previous ones, in single women it appeared a totally different pattern of responses and always below on the scale of ambition. In the question about the desired salary to receive, for example, the amount was reduced to $18,000 per year less compared to the private response. Willingness to travel was also affected (7 days less per month); and the same thing happened with the desired weekly working hours: 4 hours less per week.
Thus, in the responses of the single women who were revealed to the rest of the class there was a reduction in expressed professional ambitions and leadership The authors concluded that these women do not want to appear ambitious because of the “bad image” this produces in the search for a partner. As one of its authors indicates: “single women avoid actions that could help them in their careers when they have negative consequences in the “marriage market”.”
Women’s success associated with divorce
The second work was carried out by the couple Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne, in Sweden. This study shows how career progression in women negatively affects their marriage, unlike in men.
This research was possible thanks to the fact that the Swedish government presents an extensive registry of information on its inhabitants (to the joy of sociologists). In fact, they focused on a sector where the ambitions are very clear: in marriage couples of aspiring parliamentarians
Among politicians in this country there is a high divorce rate. The number of these before an election is similar between future “losers” and “winners”, but changes drastically after them, with an almost double increase among winners. But This is more accentuated if I know who wins is a woman
There are several relevant factors in this phenomenon, such as age differences, but in general, it can be seen that when a woman obtains a promotion with a salary increase (in this case, also associated with a position of political power) , the divorce rate is significantly higher than if it were the man who had obtained the position. This has also been seen in promotions within private companies Although it is sometimes difficult to discern when a promotion in a company is positive or negative, it does not always lead to better conditions.
New life… in every sense
The conclusion reached by the authors is that when a woman has sudden success at work, she puts her marriage at risk if the man has always been the dominant force in the household income. To reaffirm this, they emphasized that there is a greater number of divorces in cases where the woman becomes the main source of income in the home above the husband
Of course, you cannot extrapolate these results happily to countries other than Sweden either, since the culture and traditions are different in each country. Still, one may wonder to what extent female gender roles are likely to be less constrictive elsewhere than in Sweden.
