The Male Breadwinner Is Dead

On the recently concluded Season 15 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, newbie Amanda Frances got a lot of flak from her co-stars and viewers alike, for among other things, talking about the fact that she makes more money than her partner. In one episode, she shared she earns more in a month than her partner makes in a year. On another, she emphasized she had purchased her family’s home. I found these statements jarring when I first heard them. I wanted to believe my discomfort had to do with Amanda herself: from asking for ceremonial grade matcha at a coffee shop to bragging about her designer labels, her start on the show was…rough. But when I sifted through my discomfort, I found vestiges of my conditioning at the root of it. This, even though I’ve dedicated a substantial amount of my career to gender equality work in government, non-profits and philanthropy—including shaping national and global projects on women’s economic power. Just like the fupa that refuses to leave my mid-section no matter how much weight I lose or how hard I work out, deeply ingrained social norms can be hard to shake. The discomfort Amanda provoked wasn’t just about Amanda—it was about the fact that she was disturbing a modern-day myth that culture collectively continues to perpetuate: the male breadwinner.

One of the first times I learned it is a socially punishable offense for a woman to make more money than her partner, and crucially, fail to disguise this, was at the wedding of a woman who was like an older sister to me. At the wedding, I overheard some of her friends talking about her in the way church aunties and church mothers sometimes do: gossip disguised as testimony. They were so grateful to God she was finally getting married. The bride had achieved career success relatively early, and from what I gathered, one of her first mistakes was buying a big home in London while she was still dating. But after a called-off engagement, she had learned to humble herself: she put her home up for rent and moved into a small apartment. Now, with her soon-to-be-husband, she had discussed and sought his help for financial decisions like purchasing a freezer. She had learned to let her man be a man, they agreed.

“Blessing, I hope you are learning!” one of the women said, turning to me. “We don’t want you to become a prayer point for us,” she added, as the group burst into laughter.

^{Table for Two, 2026. Patrick Akpojotor. Courtesy of Rele Gallery, Lagos.©️ Patrick Akpojotor}

From church to contemporary culture, it’s a lesson I’ve seen reinforced over and again. I’ve seen it in my life: I was once in a relationship with a man who called me everything but a child of God when I refused to pass my card to him under the table and instead offered to pay for our meal (the lion’s share of which he had ordered). I’ve seen it in the world around me, too. There are women who transfer money to their husbands so he can pay their children’s school fees from his account. There are female pastors who preach about their providers, while quietly paying rent from their speaking honorariums and book sales. There are women who speak firmly against men who go 50/50, but fund the joint account their partners pay for dates from. It’s no secret that many #tradwife influencers who teach women how to bake bread in fact make the major dough in their homes. In South Africa, some women quietly provide some or all of the money their partners use to pay for their lobola. In the US, when women earn more than their husbands, they tend to underreport their earnings on census data, while men tend to overreport theirs. All this social theatre to subterfuge a simple fact: the male breadwinner is dead.

All this social theatre to subterfuge a simple fact: the male breadwinner is dead.

When I say the male breadwinner is dead, I do not mean there are no men who are breadwinners in their homes…there are many. I mean the economy that supported a) gender-based breadwinning, and b) single-income households, no longer exists for most of humankind.

Let’s start with the latter, single-income households. The Cinderella industrial complex, an entire ecosystem from social media to sermons, continues to convince stadiums worth of women there are enough men to go around who can financially provide for them, if they play by certain rules. This is more fantasy than fact: 2025 data from the US Bureau of Labor statistics shows both spouses are employed in 49.1% of all married couple families. The traditional male breadwinner model in which the husband is employed, and the wife is not, represents only 16.7% of heterosexual married-couples in America today. This is not just a Western phenomenon: in Nigeria, for example, the 1986 Structural Adjustment Programme, prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, intensified economic pressure on households, pushing more women into the workforce out of necessity. Ultimately, the road to financial survival, stability, and prosperity for most families around the globe today is paved with dual incomes.

Even in dual income households, the idea that the person who earns the higher income in heterosexual relationships will be the man is divorced from the workings of the world. While gender absolutely plays a role in earnings (hello, gender pay gap), how much money a person makes today is determined by several factors including: education, talent, industry, geography, who you know, how you look, and more. This means the breadwinners in many homes not only are but will continue to be women.

Female breadwinning is increasingly the norm among younger generations in wealthy countries. In the UK, for example, as of 2022, the average young woman had a higher income than her male counterpart. Across the pond, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center analysis, young women in New York and Washington, D.C. earned 102% of what their male peers earned among full-time, year-round workers.

This normative inversion has been coming to a head around the globe for decades, triggered by shifts in education (girls and women have been outnumbering and outperforming their male peers in school for a while), and the economy (e.g., the decline of traditional ‘male industries’ like manufacturing and construction). In short, the female breadwinner is not an aberration: it is social evolution.

Today, I suspect the question isn’t whether men are or can be breadwinners in most homes. Data and the laws of economics tell us they aren’t and won’t be. The question is whether they should be.

Some argue that modern life has changed things, but men are biologically wired to provide. “Man hunts, family eats” was a simpler time, they say. History would beg to differ. Anthropological evidence, some of which goes as far back as 9,000 years, shows even before modern economies, women have long been providers for their families. Because hunting was often unreliable and unsuccessful, gathering, which was primarily done by women, consistently provided most of a group’s food across many societies. Importantly, archaeological evidence from 63 different foraging societies across every continent, from Australia to Africa, found women were hunters in most of these societies.

The shift from foraging to settled agriculture solidified the male breadwinner norm in many societies. With the dawn of settled agriculture, farmers began to own land and property was passed down patriarchal lines. Women, on the other hand, moved away from their families when they got married. As Melissa Hogenboom notes in Breadwinners, these patterns began a gendered divide of men as breadwinners and women as caretakers.1

The male breadwinner norm was eventually encoded in law. For centuries, women couldn’t legally inherit land, obtain a mortgage or lease, open a bank account or get a credit card without a male guarantor in many countries. A few decades ago, women began to (re)claim economic power in large droves (at least in the west), with new laws like France’s Law of 1965, America’s 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the UK’s 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. You can’t call male breadwinning natural when it required centuries of law to maintain it. Money has no gender.

You can’t call male breadwinning natural when it required centuries of law to maintain it. Money has no gender.

In Christian circles, 1 Timothy 5:8 is often cited as proof that breadwinning is a God-ordained masculine role: “But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (KJV). Here’s the problem with that argument: in the original Greek of this verse, εἰ δέ τις τῶν ἰδίων καὶ μάλιστα τῶν οἰκείων οὐ προνοεῖ, τὴν πίστιν ἤρνηται καὶ ἔστιν ἀπίστου χείρων, there is no “he.” The King James translation of the Bible gendered this verse, but τις (tis), meaning “anyone” or “someone” can be found in the original text. Apostle Paul who wrote this text was addressing a specific problem in the early church: the church’s welfare program for widows was being abused by families who could afford to care for their widowed relatives. The idea that Paul was establishing a male breadwinner doctrine is ironic at best given his ministry was financially supported by women named in scripture. Jesus’ too.

What is it about the idea of the male breadwinner that makes us cling to it so fiercely? Why are our relationship rules not adapting alongside evolving economics? I’ve had iterations of this conversation many times, in many ways in my personal and professional lives over the years. I’ve discussed this over drinks and over dinner, through focus groups and phone polls, from London to Lagos, in New York and Nairobi. What has become increasingly clear to me is this: no matter how gender progressive a person claims to be, intimate relationships are where deep cognitive dissonances surface—self-included.

Many men want the benefits of equality, such as working and even wealthy wives, but the privileges of patriarchy, like abdicating caretaking responsibilities and reserving the right for the final say in household matters.

“A lot of men want submissive providers,” a former colleague once quipped.

“A lot of men want submissive providers”

Many women want the freedoms of equality, such as equal pay in the workplace, but the protections of patriarchy, such as financial provision from their male partners.

“What’s mine is mine, and what’s his is ours,” some of my successful friends have told me.

It’s worth noting here: for a long time, the logic that supported paying men more money than their female peers in the workplace was the fact that men had to take care of their families. There is a contradiction in advocating for equal pay opportunities for women in the public sphere and upholding the male breadwinner norm in the private sphere.

For some women, like Shera Seven of “sprinkle sprinkle” social media fame, what’s at play is not cognitive dissonance, but a calculated choice: if men can no longer be trusted as partners, profit from the breadwinner myth and extract whatever financial value you can from them.

But women pay when they buy into the breadwinner myth. Financial vulnerability is the tightrope many walk when they rely on a male breadwinner. The death of or divorce from a breadwinner are just some of the risks financially dependent women sign up for. Add all types of abuse to the equation, from financial to physical. In some of the worst-case scenarios, women have faced criminal liability for the financial decisions of their partners. Even in the best relationships, a man can lose his job, and a woman can feel the ennui of not leveraging her earning potential.

Financially independent women are not exempt from the harms of the male breadwinner myth either. Because we are not deconstructing the breadwinner myth, we are not constructing new caretaking norms…not quickly enough at least. Women are still expected to carry a disproportionate load of caretaking and childrearing responsibilities, even when they are financial contributors or breadwinners. On the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Amanda talked about how supportive her partner was on the home front, allowing her to thrive in her business. Unfortunately, this is still rare. Every day, there are women working double shifts—one at work, and one at home—and they are exhausted.

One could perhaps draw a straight line between the #TradWives and #SoftLife movements and the fact that a generation of women watched their mothers gain economic freedom, without losing domestic burden. Many women who broke glass ceilings got cut by the glass. Post leaning in, so many women are burned out, and want different.

The breadwinner myth is costing men something more amorphous: identity. Around the world we are watching men unravel as they face a question they were never prepared to answer: what makes a man the man in a relationship when he is not the breadwinner? Men can still be providers, even when the provision is not financial, some say. Yes, and: by that logic women have always been providers, too. Women have long provided emotional support, caretaking labor and social infrastructure in homes and communities. For all of history, childbearing women have provided life itself. The fact is, money is power, and breadwinning has historically provided men with disproportionate power. In the face of women’s economic advancement and men’s loss of economic privilege, we are witnessing the fragility and toxicity of masculine identities constructed on money. A straight line can be drawn between the rise of women’s economic power and the rise of incel culture.

Most men were prepared for a world in which they would be needed, and as Olivia Barbulescu writes, they’re struggling to adapt to a world where they need to be wanted. A 2019 study found that men’s psychological distress rises when their wives earn over 40% of household income. I’ve seen one man go as far as trying to sabotage his wife professionally when she became the breadwinner. Several studies have found divorce is more likely among couples where the wife is the breadwinner.

The myth is costing men their very lives. Global data shows rising depression among men, with economic displacement often cited as a contributing factor. In England and Wales, the male suicide rate is now at its highest level since 1999–with men accounting for around three-quarters of all suicide deaths, and those who die statistically likely to be unemployed. In South Africa, which ranks among the highest suicide rates in the world, men are four to five times more likely to die by suicide than women, with unemployment cited as a primary contributing factor.

Women, men, families, communities…the breadwinner myth impacts all of us. The crisis today is not that the male breadwinner is dead. It is this: many of us no longer know what masculinity, femininity, partnership, and love are supposed to look like without him. In the gap between economic reality and cultural mythology, there is so much shame, performance, resentment, delusion, confusion, burnout, and abuse. There are lives being lost. By declaring she is a breadwinner, purely as a matter of fact, and on a popular platform, Amanda was on to something.

What happens when romantic ideals outlive the economic realities that created them? Will heterosexual relationships survive a world where male breadwinning is no longer a reliable organizing principle?

Will heterosexual relationships survive a world where male breadwinning is no longer a reliable organizing principle?