Economically Female-Dependent Men Tend to Cheat

Apparently, the more economically dependent a man is on his female partner, the more likely he is to be unfaithful to her, a new study that will be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, implies.

Women of the other hand, the more they depend on their male partner economically the less they will cheat on them, as study authors concluded.

Christin Munsch, a sociology PhD candidate at Cornell University, and author of “The Effect of Relative Income Disparity on Infidelity for Men and Women” said that “for women, economic dependency seems to have the opposite effect: the more dependent they are on their male partners, the less likely they are to engage in infidelity.”

The study looked at 18 to 28-year-old married and living together couples, that were in the same relationship for over a year.

The conclusion of this survey is that men who were completely dependent on their female partner's income had five times more chances of cheating on them, than men who contributed an equal amount of money to the partnership.

When age, education level, religious attendance, income and relationship satisfaction were taken into consideration, there was no more link between economic dependence and infidelity.

Munsch found an explanation and said that “one or more of these variables is impacting the relationship, for example, it may be that men who make less money than their partners are more unhappy and cheat because they are unhappy, not necessarily because they make less money.”

Men whose partners made about 75 percent of their incomes were the less likely to cheat, as ironically, those that earned significantly more than their female partners were also more likely to cheat.

“At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men's gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners,” Munsch explained.

“At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating like long work hours, travel, and higher incomes that make cheating easier to conceal.”

When putting all this together, very few people people cheat on their partners, or are being honest about it in surveys, Munsch says, as data showed that an average of near 3.8 percent of male partners and 1.4% of female partners that cheated in any given year during the six-year period of the study.

Another finding of the study was that women who were financially dependent on their male partners were less likely to cheat than those that earned the same or more: if completely dependent financially, they were 50% less likely to cheat than women that earned the same amount as their male partners and 75% less likely to cheat than those who made more money than their male partners.

The results stay the same even when age, education level, religious attendance, income and relationship satisfaction are taken into consideration.
Munsch explained that “for women, making less money than a male partner is not threatening, it is the status quo.

“More importantly, economically dependent women may encounter fewer opportunities to cheat, and they may make a calculated decision that cheating just isn't worth it [because] if they get caught, their livelihood is at risk.”