Does role reversal work?

Last year Julia Gillard, touted by some as a future Australian PM, urged us to consider the idea of a gender role reversal within marriage. She said of the young careerist woman of the future that,

She should be surrounded by boys who grow up to be men who feel free to make the choice to be the carer, the at-home dad, the part-time working dad, to have more options than being the breadwinner.

I've already had a shot at criticising Gillard's thoughts on the issue. I'd like, though, to briefly revisit question of whether a female provider/male child-carer model of family life can work in practice.

One source of evidence that men and women are not so easily interchangeable in their family roles is a major German study on rates of divorce in Sweden in the 1980s and 90s.

What the study found is that even in Sweden, where feminist values are most strongly entrenched, each rise in the proportion of family income earned by the wife increased the odds of divorce. As the study's authors explained:

There was a clear linear pattern in the effect of a wife's relative income: the higher the wife's share in the couple's income, the higher the divorce risk.

The risk of divorce increased until it was double the rate for marriages with a male breadwinner (see Figure 2 on p.22 of the study for a clear presentation of the study results).

A role-reversed marriage is therefore a considerably less stable option than the regular type.

However, there is even stronger evidence provided by a major Melbourne study that role reversal works poorly in practice. I'll present this evidence in my next post.