For Whitney Hess, a 25-year-old software designer in New York, the tension that ultimately ended her recent relationships was all right there, in the digits on her pay stub.
The awkwardness started with nights out. She would want to try the latest downtown bistro, but her boyfriends, who worked in creative jobs that paid less than hers, preferred diners.
They would say, “Wow, you’re so sophisticated,” she recalled. A first look at her apartment, a smartly appointed studio in a full-service building in the Tribeca area of Manhattan, would only reinforce the impression. “They wouldn’t want me to see their apartments,” she said, because they lived in cramped surroundings in distant quadrants of Brooklyn or the Bronx.
Putting it on the table
One of them, she said, finally just came out and said it. “Look,” he told Hess, “it makes me really uncomfortable that you make more money than me. I’m going to put that out on the table and try to get over it.”
But he never got over it, she said.
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“The sad thing is that I really liked the guy,” she said. “If that hadn’t been an issue with him, we’d probably still be dating.”
Hess’ quandary is becoming more common for young women. For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York.
For instance, the median income of women age 21 to 30 in New York who are employed full time was 17 percent higher than that of comparable men.
Beveridge said the gap is largely driven by a gulf in education: 53 percent of women employed full time in their 20s were college graduates, compared with 38 percent of men.
The shift is playing out in new, unanticipated ways on the dating front. Women are encountering forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet, and are trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.
A lot of young women “are of two minds,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research organization. “On one hand, they’re proud of their achievements, and they think they want a man who shares house chores and child care. But on the other hand, they’re scared by their own achievement, and they’re a little nervous having a man who won’t be the main breadwinner.”
Young affluent women say they are learning to advertise their good fortune in a manner very different from their male counterparts. For men, it is accepted — even desirable — to flaunt their high status. Not so for many women.
So as not to flaunt her own salary, Lori Weiss, a 29-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, has found herself clipping price tags off expensive clothes she buys on shopping binges, or hiding shopping bags in the closet so men she was dating would not see them lying around and feel threatened by her spending power.
“A lot of guys don’t want to admit they have a problem with it,” she said, referring to income disparity. “They don’t want to be ‘that guy.’ But I think it’s ingrained.”
Multiple ramifications
Women said the income disparity becomes obvious in all facets of dating: where you live, what you like to do for fun and how you travel. It often comes down to minimizing who they are — successful, focused women — with their dates, who may be lagging a bit behind.
Sometimes it is the women who are uncomfortable with the role reversal.
Hilary Rowland, 28, bought her first condominium when she was 18, using money she had earned from an online business started when she was 15. Last spring Rowland, who lives in New York, started dating a 34-year-old musician.
“I usually always fly business or first,” she said in an e-mail message. “The one trip where he paid for the flight — we stayed at a friend’s place — he didn’t tell me the details, then flew us economy on a 6 a.m. flight with a two-hour stopover, from Salt Lake City, to save money. I would have rather paid myself and flown business at a regular hour.”
Too much trouble
Rowland, like some other women interviewed, said that she has come to the conclusion that it would be easier to date someone in the same economic bracket.
The discomfort over who pays for what seems not really to be about money, plain and simple. Instead, it is suggestive of the complex psychology of what many of these women expect from their dates (for him to be a traditional breadwinner) — and what they think they should expect (Oh, I just want him to be a nice guy).
Michael R. Cunningham, a psychologist who teaches in the communication department at the University of Louisville, conducted a survey of college women to see if, upon graduation, they would prefer to settle down with a high school teacher who has short workdays, summers off and spare energy to help raise children, or with a surgeon who earns eight times as much but works brutal hours. Three-quarters of the women said they would choose the teacher.
The point, Cunningham said, was that young professionally oriented women have no problem dating down if the man is secure, motivated in his own field and emotionally supportive.
At least, that’s what they say in surveys. Talk about the subject with women a bit older, and you hear ambivalence, if not downright hostility, about the income disparity.
Jade Wannell, 25, a producer at a Chicago ad agency who lives in a high-rise apartment, started dating a 29-year-old administrator at a trucking company last year. “He was really sweet,” she said. But “he didn’t work many hours and ended up hanging out at home a lot. I was bored and didn’t feel challenged.”
To her, his lack of income masked a greater problem, a lack of drive.
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