Women's Wages Are Rising: Why Are So Many Families Getting Poorer?

Article here. Excerpt:

'The good news, trumpeted in Women’s Work, the latest report from the Pew Economic Mobility Project, is that dramatic increases in women’s labor-force participation have boosted the “financial security and mobility” of millions of families across America since 1970. The bad news is that growing economic opportunities for women have not translated into more family income for poor and working-class families at the lower end of the income ladder. That’s surprising, because up and down the income ladder, women have been bringing home more bacon since the 1970s, as the figure below illustrates.
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One reason that lower-income families are losing economic ground is that gains in women’s income have been offset by declines in marriage among the poor and working class. As the figure below indicates, more than half of these families are headed by just one parent—typically a single mother. Lacking the income of two parents, or the income of a father, these single-parent families are much less likely to reap the benefits of increases in income that have accrued to today’s working women. This is one reason why single-mother families are much more likely to be struggling to make ends meet. Indeed, one recent estimate found that the median income for married families in 2012 was about $81,000, compared to about $25,000 for single mothers.
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Declines in men’s income for this group also help explain why working-class and poor mothers are not getting and staying married as much as their upscale peers. Because they tend to pair off with men who are similarly situated economically as they are, working-class and poor women are less likely to see the men in their lives as marriageable or worth sticking with. Indeed, the research tells us that men’s income remains a strong predictor of marrying and steering clear of divorce court. So, men’s money still matters when it comes to forming and sustaining today’s marriages and, unfortunately, the eroding economic standing of lower-income men means that they are less likely to be deemed worthy of marriage.
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Finally, despite all the talk about women as the incipient “richer sex” about to lead the way to a thoroughgoing revolution in gender roles, the fact of the matter is that the gender revolution in married families has largely stalled out since the 1990s. As the graph below indicates, maternal labor-force participation basically came to a halt in the last decade and a half—for married (and single) mothers. This means that a large minority of families, including many lower-income families, do not stand to gain economically from the increases in women’s work documented in this new Pew report.'