Cover Story: The new breadwinners

When Johnny met Krista, he was a scruffy hipster working the door at a Gainesville, Fla., nightclub. She was studying at the nearby University of Florida on the way to earning a degree in interior design with a minor in architecture.

After graduating, Krista moved to Portland, Ore., then Atlanta, pulling espresso shots at Starbucks until she networked her way into a job at a small design company. From there, she hopped to one of the city’s largest architecture firms, where she is involved in designing the interiors of convention centers, shopping malls, luxury hotels and the occasional big-city aquarium. It’s a solid, white-collar job with plenty of opportunity for advancement.

As Krista was making her career climb, Johnny played bass in various indie-rock bands. He worked construction jobs, did plumbing and, for a while, was employed as a sous chef in New York. He spent two years as a runway model, shuttling between London, Paris and Milan. Finally, he moved to Atlanta to join an up-and-coming band called the Hiss just before a blast of fame sent the group on tour with the likes of Oasis and the White Stripes across the United States and Europe. It was a wild ride that petered out after a couple of years or so.

By then, Krista and Johnny, who’d become reacquainted in Atlanta, were dating seriously. When they got married last year, Johnny Kral, now 27, was confronted with the real-life decision that every musician dreads. Putting his rock-star dreams aside to pursue a more practical livelihood, Kral left the band and took a full-time job as an auto mechanic. “I knew we’d be buying a house and having kids and that the band wouldn’t provide enough for us financially,” he explains.

Now, nearly three months after their first anniversary, the Krals admit money has been tight. It’s largely Krista’s salary that keeps the couple afloat financially.

But the fact that she earns significantly more than her husband has never been a source of conflict between them, says Krista, 29. It’s not as if she expected – or even hoped – he would support her. “I’d be a complete jerk if I resented him,” she says. “The only complaint I have with what he makes is that he should get paid more for as hard as he works.”

The Krals’ situation represents a drastic shift from the ’50s and ’60s, a time when – if TV shows can be seen as reflecting family norms – husbands like Ralph Kramden frequently bellowed, “No wife of mine is gonna work!” and housewives like Laura Petrie always had Rob’s slippers ready and dinner on the table when he got home from a grueling day of writing gags.

It’s not just the black-and-white video that makes these shows seem ancient to us now. It was only a few years later that housebound Laura Petrie grew up to become spunky career gal Mary Richards, who, by dint of her own talent and abilities, was destined to “make it after all.”

In the three decades since, we’ve evolved to the “Sex in the City” romance between high-salaried lawyer Miranda and bartender Steve. They broke up at one point when Steve felt inadequate after Miranda tried to buy him an expensive suit, but they eventually married. And while Carrie Bradshaw may be the cultural icon, it is Miranda’s and Steve’s contentment that reflects a growing trend in marriage where the woman doesn’t cook the bacon – she’s the one who brings it home.

This past fall, a New York Times article cited a study indicating that, for the first time ever, twentysomething women in the country’s largest cities are earning more than their male peers. I know this because my wife read it to me over breakfast with a discernable gleam in her eye.

Though we’re removed from our 20s, many of the emerging differences between the sexes mentioned in the article had a familiar ring, such as the increasing number of women today with advanced degrees. My wife has a master’s, and as a senior manager with Turner Broadcasting, she’s serious about positioning herself to advance up the corporate ladder. I, on the other hand, write for an alt-weekly newspaper.

When we met, my wife was a grad student with a bundle of student loans. After school, she started out slowly, with internships, low-rung jobs and a long, slave-wage stint at a nonprofit arts group. Now, however, she earns what I’ll gently describe as, well, vastly more than I do. And if we remain in our respective fields, I expect she always will.

I’m cool with that. I know she’s cool with that. With each promotion she earns, I’ll joke, “You mean you didn’t get the corner office? Dammit, woman!” But the subject got me wondering: If this is a growing trend among our youngers, is anyone – besides Ralph Kramden – not cool with it?

The short answer is, sometimes.

A well-known 1993 study of 300 randomly selected, dual-earner couples showed that husbands and wives reacted differently to the wife’s financial success.

“For the women, there was no difference in her perception of her marriage because of her income,” says Rosalind Barnett, the study’s author and director of the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Conversely, she says, the more the wife earned, “the less positively the husband felt about the marriage.”

But in the 14 years since the study, much has changed.

Like me, Johnny Kral has come to grips with the idea that his wife will outearn him. “It sounds bad when I say it, but the reason she earns more is my own fault,” he says. “I could’ve gone to college, but (instead) I fooled around for six years while she was getting a degree. When we started dating, I was making $9 an hour. One of the reasons I fell in love with her is that she didn’t care what I did. And if she does well, that just shows I have good taste in women. I tell friends what my wife does and they’re impressed. I want her to succeed.”

For her part, Krista seems far removed from earlier eras, when young women were more likely to choose a husband based on his job prospects or the size of his inheritance. The age-old expectation that women “marry up” by snaring an older, more experienced, better-educated husband has lost much of its traction for her generation.

“When we were first dating, Johnny made considerably less than I did and I used to help him out,” Krista says. In fact, nearly all of her girlfriends also outearn their mates – a natural by-product, she concedes, of their shared enthusiasm for indie-rocker types.

“There was never a point where I wondered whether he was the right guy because of money,” she explains. “I couldn’t imagine Johnny in a suit – yuck! I’m just not attracted to business guys.” And she appreciates his talents as a handyman; a few weeks ago, he built a deck on the back of their house.

Still, Johnny admits he sometimes yearns at least to earn enough to give them a few more comforts. The day after the couple returned from a recent vacation, he says, he began “freaking out” over finances and applied to college. He decided later they couldn’t afford the tuition. “Kris has never told me I should find another career,” he says. “But my pride makes me feel like I should make more money.”

Britney and K-Fed. Oprah and Stedman. Margaret Thatcher and Dennis. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor.

Beyond the difference in salaries, many of us guys have found ourselves in a relationship with a successful, accomplished woman whose schedule seems faster-paced than our own. Looking back now, at 40, Jason Hodges realizes he should’ve seen that coming as long ago as college.

“My father was a corporate executive and I had a vague notion that I would do something in business,” he says. “But in the back of my mind, I think I knew that wouldn’t happen.”

His first inkling may have been his decision while at Washington and Lee University to major in German, a choice he says “befuddled” his parents. After graduation, Jason spent a year in Germany to polish his language skills. Then he moved to Atlanta and married his college sweetheart, Meredith.

Over the next few years, Jason never put his language skills to use. Instead, he worked as a baggage handler for Delta, an energy auditor at Georgia Power, a human resources analyst, a corporate financing coordinator and a gardener’s assistant. Finally, he returned to school, completing the full two years of course work in counseling psychology at GSU – but he never took the practicum required to earn a degree. “I’ve been one of those people who’s never figured out what he wanted to do,” Jason says.

At the same time, Meredith was doing the corporate thing, eventually snaring a job at one of Georgia’s largest natural-gas suppliers. Now also 40 and a vice president of human resources, she spends most days interviewing job applicants. Which makes it all the more ironic that, for so long, she had such a poor understanding of her own aspirations. “I was one of those women who grew up with the fantasy that she’d have two kids and stay home and do a little volunteer work,” she says.

But after maternity leave to have their daughter, Meredith says, “I was never so glad to get back to work. Staying home seemed like a nice idea that just wasn’t for me. Now, six years later, I’m convinced I made the right choice.”

Having Jason at home while their daughter was young was an easy decision for both parents. “The question was, ‘Who’s better at earning the money and who’s better at staying home?’” Meredith says.

In sociology-speak, the Hodges represent a “status-reversal couple,” in which the husband and wife have swapped virtually all traditional roles and responsibilities. Most mornings, Jason walks his daughter to school – literally across the street – and then volunteers at the school library, runs errands or tidies up around the family’s comfortable house on a pleasant College Park street. Most evenings, he prepares dinner. He hasn’t drawn a regular paycheck for several years.

Although telling people he’s a stay-at-home dad sometimes earns him strange looks – often from stay-at-home moms with successful husbands – Jason seems at ease with his status, even joking about it: “Someone asked my daughter the other day what her daddy does and she said, ‘Nothin’.’”

In a couple more years, Jason would like to go back to work – maybe as a substitute teacher or something in health care, he muses – but not because it’s a financial necessity. And only if he can still pick his daughter up after school. “The reason for getting a job would be the satisfaction of doing something I enjoy, although it would be a nice feeling to contribute to the family income,” he says. “I don’t ever feel like Meredith resents me because she’s the sole breadwinner, but maybe I’m just not perceptive.”

Not to worry. Meredith says their current arrangement – her bringing home the bacon, him holding down the home front – suits her perfectly. She supports Jason’s desire to find a job, but only because it might make him happier.

“I absolutely wouldn’t change our situation at all,” she says.

The growth in women’s income likely has less to do with the advent of the Women’s Lib movement in the early ’60s, and more with the evolution of the American job market, explains Kathleen Gerson, professor of sociology at New York University and co-author of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality.

At midcentury, powerful labor unions ensured that even factory workers who never went to college could provide for a family of four on a single salary. But a steeply climbing cost of living made it less possible for women to stay home. And as the country has gradually shifted away from heavy manufacturing to an information-based economy, women’s value as employees continued to rise. “The kind of jobs available today depend more on higher education and better verbal skills,” Gerson says.

And that’s where women have men beat. According to U.S. Census figures, the number of female college graduates first topped men around 1990, and the gender gap is rapidly widening. Generally, young women get better grades in school and earn the lioness’ share of advanced degrees.

A study unveiled last year in the Journal of Marriage and Family showed that in 1970, the husband earned at least 60 percent of the family income or was the sole breadwinner in 90 percent of all marriages. By 2001, that “conventional family model” had dwindled to 64 percent of the population, with about 12 percent of wives earning significantly more than their husbands. Gerson estimates that last figure now is probably closer to 20 percent.

It’s not so much that women today are striving to compete with men, she says, but that they feel a desire for self-sufficiency that June Cleaver – and their own mothers – simply didn’t have. “It used to be that the way people defined adulthood was getting married and having kids,” Gerson says. “Now it’s being able to support yourself. It’s as much about independence as equality. Women are aware they can’t simply be dependent on men.”

But old ways die hard. The last frontier has been the traditional gender roles: The man earns a living and the woman looks after the children. As Gerson says: “Marriages are certainly more egalitarian, but a husband still feels a responsibility to take care of his wife.”

Ben Jastatt, 31, would like to do just that – and he plans to. But for now, he’s struggling to get his one-man business off the ground. A little more than a year ago, he left an administrative job to follow his muse and become a commercial music composer. His company, afiremusic, has notched a few commissions – notably from Cartoon Network – but so far his muse hasn’t made him rich. “Right now, I’m getting by,” he says.

His wife, Joanne, 32, took awhile to find her own groove. After earning a degree in hospitality management, followed by an MBA, she discovered she hated the hotel business. So she joined MindSpring. When she met Ben, she was between jobs and the less settled of the two.

Then she landed a corporate IT job at Turner and began to make serious money. About the same time Ben decided to launch his company, the couple had a daughter. Joanne suggested that, just maybe, Ben could look after the baby since he’d be home anyway. No, he said, there’s no way that would allow him to get anything done. The compromise: He drops her off and picks her up from day care. “I feel like I’m missing out on some of the mom stuff that he gets to do,” she says, a comment that makes him wince.

Joanne acknowledges the couple’s circumstances have created a bit of tension – mostly because of Ben’s anxiety that others might see him as a slacker with a go-getter wife – but says she’s fine with the situation. “I’d always made less than anyone I’d ever dated, so it’s felt good to be earning more than a guy,” she says. “I think it helps that I work in IT, which Ben thinks is overpaid.”

Ben is clearly uncomfortable discussing this subject, even after I break the ice by mentioning my wife’s coast-to-coast meeting schedule, expense-account lunches and BlackBerry addiction. He wants to make it clear he saved up to bankroll his business and isn’t simply coasting on Joanne’s salary. “I’m not doing this because I’m lazy, but because I want this to be successful,” he says. “Ultimately, I hope my business does well enough to support us both.”

As I leave the interview, Ben calls out: “Don’t emasculate me.”

I can’t tell whether he’s kidding.

For women to overtake men as family breadwinners, they’ll have to overcome one remaining obstacle: kids — or, more precisely, the conventional view that women are more suited to, and more emotionally rewarded by, staying home with the children.

“The under-40 generations have been raised with more gender equality and gender neutrality, but we haven’t left tradition completely behind,” explains David Woodsfellow, a marriage counselor based in Buckhead. “Having children forces couples to confront their own gender roles: who’s going to put less emphasis on work for the benefit of the kids.”

Gerson says the research points to a rising level of parenting equality and to more acceptance by men of ambitious, successful wives. In fact, the long-held goal of middle-class men to earn enough so one’s wife doesn’t need to work is fading fast. About one-third of husbands want their wives to have careers, she says, and encourage their success. “I’ve never interviewed a man who resented his wife’s outearning him,” she says. “More money is more money, and that tends to make everybody happy.”

By most appearances, the Krals seem healthy and happy – and of one mind when it comes to dealing with the future. “I couldn’t be a stay-at-home mom,” Krista admits. “I think I’d go crazy.”

Johnny agrees it would make sense for him to stay home if they have children soon, as they’d like. For extra income, he’d repair cars in their driveway. It’s a decision he seems quite at ease with.

“She has a greater potential for making more money than I do,” he says. “I think of us as a team whose job it is to take care of the other. I’m very happy with my life.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story referred incorrectly to Krista Kral’s former place of residence, she once lived in Portland, Ore., not Seattle. Also, Ben Jastatt previously worked as a deputy director of communications for Turner Enterprises.