Paycheck envy pushes men to infidelity, survey says

There's a timeless Peggy Lee song that goes "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan. And never, never, never let you forget you're a man."

The title song of her 1963 album, "I'm a Woman" made it into a 1970s commercial and the phrase has become part of the workingwoman culture.

Now, it turns out, the dynamics of gender identity are a bit more complicated than the "Mad Men" of the 1970s envisioned them in that perfume commercial. In many cases, women who are bringing home the bacon may need the frying pan to keep philandering partners at home.

The message conveyed in a study released Monday is certain to be controversial among women who work hard outside the home to help support their families. It suggests that if you are the betrayed wife or female partner of a philandering man, you may have your paycheck to blame.

Being in a relationship with a female partner who earns more than he does can make a man feel less of a man, Cornell University sociologist Christin Munsch told colleagues Monday in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. To affirm and restore his battered sense of manhood, a man may feel he needs to go outside the relationship in search of sexual conquest, she said.

She cites research showing that nothing makes a man feel his power like a sexual conquest. "Sexual encounters, particularly with multiple women, are a defining feature of hegemonic masculinity," Munsch writes.

Yes, yes, of course, relationship satisfaction matters, as does the religiosity of the man in question. As either increases, the odds of a man engaging in extramarital sex go down, Munsch found. Factors that make a man more likely to stray from a relationship include a low level of education.

But after you account for these factors, what distinguishes the man who is likely to cheat from the man who is not? It's his female partner's bigger paycheck.

Now, this can't be good because, according to Ellen Galinski of the Manhattan-based Families and Work Institute, one in four working women now makes at least 10 percent more than does her husband. In homes with a working woman, her pay accounts for an average of 44 percent of the household's income, Galinski says.

Somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of women and 20 percent and 25 percent of men report having had sex with someone other than their spouse. But few studies have explored what may drive someone to cheat, and how those obvious gender differences may color the motives of spouses in deciding whether to remain faithful or have an affair.

But the data on infidelity, Munsch reports, bear out her "social identity theory" of infidelity.

Combing through the responses of a nationally representative sample collected in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the last such survey to have been done, Munsch found that for men who ranked low in terms of their economic dependence on a female partner, the probability of infidelity was relatively low. With every upward click of Munsch's measure of male economic dependence on a female partner, men were more likely to cheat.