The Changing Employment Gap: Husbands' Earnings and Married Mothers' Work, 1990--2024

How does a married woman's employment vary with her husband's earnings, and has this relationship changed? Using 35 years of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (1990–2024; 823,856 married women aged 25–54), we document two patterns. First, the familiar inverted-U shape, in which wives of middle earners are most likely to work, is largely accounted for by observed characteristics, especially education. After adjustment, employment is nearly flat (within one percentage point) across the bottom three quintiles of husbands' earnings and lower in the top two: wives of top-quintile husbands are 10.5 percentage points less likely to have worked than wives of middle-quintile husbands. Second, for mothers of children under 6 this high-earnings gap shrank from 16.1 points in survey years 1990–99 to 6.1 points in 2020–24, while it changed little for other wives; the difference between the two changes is 9.2 percentage points (95% CI 6.5 to 12.0). The gap had stopped narrowing in the 1990s and 2000s, as earlier studies also found; most of the recent narrowing appears in the 2020–24 surveys, especially 2023–24. It is largest for wives of top-decile husbands, is primarily reflected in higher rates of full-time employment, and is similar for mothers with and without a college degree. All estimates are observational associations. Code and replication materials are included; raw IPUMS data are not redistributed.