It's been more than a generation since women started making more money than men in some households due to increases in equality between the sexes. The phrasing and positioning used implies that a stay-at-home dad is something that we should be reacting to as an economic problem.
In other words, it required the assumption that men are the proper breadwinners in heterosexual households.
Perhaps the article writer was making the assumption you imply, but there's potentially more to it than that.
Members of households all need to contribute, and while I am neither female nor married, I have heard from many married females that unemployed men do not generally tend to assume the duties of housekeeping. That is to say, the wife winds up both breadwinning and housekeeping, and the man does not contribute. This is broken.
It's sexist of me to generalize (and certainly I hope if I wind up married and unemployed, I won't let my partner take all the burden), and it may well not be what the author was thinking of, but if we take feminine anecdotes at face value there are more reasons to encourage men to be breadwinners than simply because it's their role.
Hear hear. Also, besides that, there is still a fairly widespread (if minor) stigma to making less than one's wife. It's not necessarily the writer making that judgement.
I agree, in that the article is sexist by omitting half of the adult population! When reading it, I was expecting to see the equivalent numbers for women out of the workforce, but the author didn't provide this information. Women have an equal 'right' to work, but this is ignored by the article.
You're reading something into the article that isn't there. Perhaps that is what the author was getting at, but he certainly didn't make it clear. Rather it could simply be referring to an increase in the number of single-income households.
And salaries for women still tend to be lower than those for men. Is it sexist to point this out?
The article is sexist from the title... it is gender specific from the beginning for no apparent economic or societal reason other than to be outright sexist.
It's not mentioned in the article, but the unemployment rate among men is higher than among women. Even if it weren't, there is absolutely nothing sexist about an article which addresses unemployment for one sex to the exclusion of the other, just as there would be nothing racist about an article on unemployment among blacks, whites, et cetera.
I think seanmcq is referring to the implication that "getting by" means subsistence wage (of the wife).
I don't think it was a sexist statement, but rather the focus is on "getting by." It could've been "getting by on his partner's wage" (if he were homosexual).
