I’m gonna ask for a cite on this. Here is the story as I understand it. Originally, each person paid their own tax on their own income. Except in community property states (California and a couple others). In those states, all income was divided between spouses and they got the advantage of the lower rates. This was unfair to everyone else and so the privilege was extended to everyone.
In my household growing up, my father got paid cash and gave my mother a grocery allowance. He paid all bills. Until the late 40s, he didn’t have a checking account (you had to maintain a substantial balance) and then they introduced “special” checking accounts where you paid 10c a check. Before that he went to a bill-paying agency where he paid a small fee for paying each bill.
I was born in 1983, and threads like this blow my mind. My mother earned her degree while single and worked as a mechanical engineer for General Motors among other corporations. She ended up leaving the field, but… That was her choice. Yes, the sexism was bad then, and I understand it’s still pretty bad for female engineers, but good god, not being able to get a credit card in your own name? I can’t even conceive of living in a society like that.
My mother for all her flaws taught me I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do with my life and her only wish is that I would be happy doing it. I took it for granted. I really did.
Not sure about the USA, but I seem to recall well into the 1980’s the Ontario government was hostile to the idea that supermarkets take credit cards, since the worry was that the premium required to cover CC percentage fees would be added to the price of food for everyone. (Credit card agreements at the time forbade putting a “premium” on the price of using a card.) I think by the 1990’s it was common.
I’m sure also there were plenty of women voters (and lesser paid husbands) who would object to the idea that one spouse could sit at home and “do nothing” while other women worked their butts off in a paid job -and then went home to do the same housework - and the government collected the same tax from the couple despite one spouse earning twice as much. Or worse yet, the couple paid the same effective tax rate plus daycare costs, with both spouses working, as some rich lawyer or dentist with a stay-at-home wife. If the tax rate is too high - the stay-at-home wife can go out and work. So option 2 will always be the target of envy if income-splitting is allowed.
I do also recall the suggestions in the 1970’s that it could be cheaper to get divorced and still live together if both spouses worked, taxes were less in that situation back then…
In Canada, income splitting is allowed for pension income because generally these are not extremely high amounts. With no earned income, there’s a benefit in minimizing taxes because otherwise a low-income elderly person could become a burden on the tax-payer.
Also we forget how recently it was that it was not only legal to fire some woman if she got married or a married (or not) woman got pregnant, it was routine for some businesses. Or - not hire someone if they were married because they were likely to get pregnant soon. Or simply not hire women, because they’d get married and get pregnant.
(I remember a discussion I had with a female boss discussing our department’s hiring as recently as the 1990’s when this was already illegal, she said women were more likely to get pregnant and take their year off for maternity leave. I had to point out even back then that - almost as much as today - few women had more than one child, almost none had more than 2. Plus I reminded her of several work colleagues, men in their late 40’s or early 50’s, who had taken extended time off to recover from heart attacks or other medical problems, and nobody in the company had complained at all about it. )
For some couples it worked out worse, even though in principle it makes more sense.
AFAIK there are now no tax advantages to being married in the UK. At least not when it comes to income tax. If you work and your wife doesn’t, or vice versa, you still only have the one tax allowance of the working person.
When my dad was an up and coming executive at JC Penney, he was going to be transferred to Chicago. Part of the interview process was them ‘inviting’ him and my mother to Chicago for the interview.
Why her?
She had to have lunch with the JCP executives’ wives, full white gloves, 1950s country club, being measured for the group. For a woman from Charleston WV, this was intimidating as hell, knowing her husbands career was also in her hands and having to demonstrate her social cred with the Big City Sophisticates.
She passed the test, they reported back to their husbands, Dad got the job and many of those same women attended my mothers funeral 6, 8 years later.
I’ve heard plenty of stories of women back in the day entering male-dominated fields like law and medicine (and engineering) being told, “You’re taking a job away from a man.”
Guess what? In recent years, I’ve started to hear about men who are going into female-dominated fields like nursing and elementary education being told things like, “There’s going to be a single mom out there who doesn’t have a job because of you.”
My field is social work, which is overwhelmingly women, but the men I have worked with have almost exclusively held executive leadership positions. I’ve had two male CEOs and the three men in my current organization (out of fifty employees) are the CFO, a program director and an education specialist who works with young men. Nonprofits I’ve worked at fall all over themselves to hire men and they rise quickly to the top. My male peers in my graduating class had jobs lined up before they even graduated. Personally, I love working with men, I guess that’s an overgeneralization but it’s great feeling that guys are in our corner, and I developed a really strong rapport with most of them. I work in the nonprofit world, where employees often have a strong sense of shared values and relationships in the work place can be quite close.
Women engineers still get a lot of shit (I know four out of four who have experienced sexism in the workplace.) We still live in a society where men are perceived as more competent than women. Some fields have made better inroads than others, for example clinical psychology, which is female-dominated, treats women and men equally from what I’ve seen. (Just based on my husband’s experience in graduate school, research and family practice.) In the case of graduate school, it treats them equally poorly.
Yes, it is, and that’s why there are support groups for male teachers - primary (grade school) teachers whereas women don’t need separate groups. Though the issues they face go waaay beyond supposedly taking a job from a woman.
There is a slight issue with men in female-dominated professions proceeding up the hierarchy quicker than women do. That’s the only occasion I’ve seen anyone even hint about men “taking” jobs from women, and it’s not groundless. It’s a complicated topic though, not worth only an aside.
Men are less likely to interrupt or scale back their careers to raise children; I think that’s a major reason why they are more likely to be in positions of leadership or administration.
My elementary and junior high principals were always women, and older women, and this was in the 1970s. Don’t be skeptical about that, because it was true. Around here, principals seem to mostly be 30-ish women.
A male friend of mine tried to become a primary school teacher in the 1990s/2000s. He was 30-something, did excellent in his college & masters program and simply could not get a job.
Enough whispering finally came out to explain this. In our conservative midwestern big city, the districts had all decided that male primary teachers were all wannabe pedophiles and faaaar too dangerous to hire. No district head wanted to face the lynch mob of angry parents after “another” incident. Despite the fact there hadn’t been a first one; at least not locally. Everybody simply “knew” any male could not be trusted around kids.
Interesting, ref @Spice_Weasel’s comments, he gave up on kids and went into non-profits instead.
This kind of stuff makes me so angry. I dunno, I’m just the kind of person who trusts people until they give me reason not to trust them. I’ve heard of guys getting in trouble at the playground with their own kids.
I hope this is changing as men take on more child care roles in the home.
I forgot to mention earlier that not only did my primary schools have women principals, but my grade school also had several male teachers, and that included one who was black, and another who was in a wheelchair. I seriously doubt if any of them ever did anything inappropriate with their students.
I posted on these boards a few years ago that my daughter’s elementary school hired a male classroom teacher and almost half the kids assigned to his class asked to be moved before the school year started (or more properly their parents did). There was no indication whatsoever that he was any danger to the kids. A fair number of mothers on social media just thought it was unnatural for a man to teach second grade. My daughter went through second grade with 11 classmates instead of the usual 17 or 18. The school instituted a policy to not honor any classroom change requests without a solid reason.
He was a great teacher, my daughter loved being in his class. She’s the only teacher she remembers from elementary school.
This is in an affluent Boston suburb. Median household income > 150k, 98% of high schoolers going to college.
Meanwhile in a lot poorer schools there are many more male teachers in elementary schools. Having a male presence in the classroom is seen as a positive in “tougher” communities.
I see that this teacher is now an Assistant Principal for Curriculum and works in the Superintendent’s office not in a school building. Ugh!
Friend of mine mentioned a classmate in teachers’ college who was assigned a Grade 1 class as his practice class (alongside the regular teacher). The first day of school he had to go home and shave - apparently his big black beard scared the hell out of the kiddies, several were crying. Of course, this was just assigned to him, he likely was planning on high school teaching.
I recall my dad’s discussion about some department head promotion in the university back in the 1960’s, saying he was the first department head they’d promoted who was single. It was a big deal for the same reason - departments were very collegial (it being college) and the wife was expected to host staff parties at their house, including couples parties, the Christmas party, welcome dinners for new faculty, etc. So essentially they were hiring the wife too - just not paying her. Needless to say, it assumed the wife did not work and so had plenty of time to be unpaid labour. As I gather, this was pretty much standard in many businesses too in those days. (My stepmother made it very clear to my brother and I how much jeopardy we’d put our father’s job in when he got divorced from our mother… )
Just a few years ago, my cousin’s marriage ended. She was pursuing tenure at a top 5 university and he was working. He said that after the fact, they were told no marriage survived the tenure process if the other spouse also had a high-intensity job. You either needed a spouse who had time to take care of themselves, you, and everything in your mutual life, or you needed to be single and live a life of brutal simplicity. There simply wasn’t time to do the job and live a life, if you wanted to be successful.
That’s equally true in politics and in big business. The occasional very high powered couples are effectively both single, with a nanny handling any kids and other hired help doing most of the stuff a spouse would typically do.
Each member of the couple has sacrificed their own participation in their own family to the Holy Grail of advancement at work.