Journal of Family Issues

Volume 28 Number 7
July 2007 934-954
© 2007 Sage Publications
Gender Patterns in 10.1177/0192513X07300787
http://jfi.sagepub.com

Provider Role Attitudes hosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

and Behavior
Karyn Loscocco
Glenna Spitze
University at Albany, State University of New York

Although much has been written on rapidly changing work and family roles,
relatively little is known about the provider side of the work–family nexus.
Using data from a study of gender, work, and family among the self-
employed, we examine abstract and specific attitudes as well as behavior
relating to the provider role. Results show gender differences and similarities
in the meaning and influence of the provider role. Women exhibit more egal-
itarian attitudes even in this realm associated with men, yet similar propor-
tions of women and men are unable to realize their preferences for how much
providing to do. Incongruence in providing attitudes and behavior has more
consequence for men’s than for women’s psychological well-being. Although
there appears to be less of a stall in the provider side of the work–family sys-
tem than in unpaid family work, the results suggest the continued importance
of the man as good provider.

Keywords: gender norms; provider role incongruence; provider attitudes;

breadwinning; work–family roles; marital quality

T he provider role has been central to the construction of male gender iden-
tity at least since the early stages of industrial capitalism. The public
sphere of paid work became men’s domain and, with it, the primary respon-
sibility to provide for their families. However, recent decades have given rise
to a change as profound as the shift to separate spheres that was ushered in
by the industrial revolution: the dominance of the two-wage-earner family

Authors’ Note: Data collection for this research was funded by Grant 9618180 from the National
Science Foundation (Karyn Loscocco, principal investigator). Findings and conclusions expressed
are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Please address corre-
spondence to Karyn Loscocco, Arts and Sciences 321, Department of Sociology, University at
Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222; e-mail: kal74@albany.edu.

934
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 935

(Landry, 2000). As even White middle-class women became breadwinners in

record numbers, it seemed logical that the relationship between the “male”
and “female” worlds would change and also the place of the provider role in
gender schema. Yet the man as provider model continues to affect both the
organization of paid work and how people think about responsibility for earn-
ing. The comfortable fit between gender ideology and how people organize
their work and family roles is a thing of the past. Instead, the stage has been
set for incongruence between what such people think they should be doing
and what they actually do.
The focus of most past research on the struggle to carve satisfying work
and family lives in this dual-earner world has been on the division of house-
hold labor, because this is rightly seen as a primary site of gender inequal-
ity, and the struggle is more onerous for women. Most work documenting
the ambivalence wrought by incomplete social change also emphasizes the
family work side of the traditional homemaker/breadwinner model. We
know much less about the side typically associated with men. Yet the con-
tinued emphasis on the man as good provider is a key component of a
work–family system that is out of synch with the way people live their lives.
At this juncture, breadwinning is a critical gender boundary (J. M.
Gerson & Peiss, 1985; Potuchek, 1997) and therefore a likely site of varia-
tion and negotiation within families. Hochschild (1989) documented
vividly the disjuncture between what people think about how men and
women in couples should distribute domestic work and how they actually
divide it. Similarly, people’s abstract ideals about providing do not neces-
sarily match who they think should provide in their own family, and neither
will completely determine providing behavior. As Hood’s (1986) discovery
of “ambivalent coproviders” showed, some people who are part of the surge
in dual-earner families would rather not be.
Gender continues to structure the work–family system, so it is apt to influ-
ence providing attitudes and behavior as well as how people feel about incon-
sistencies between the two. Because providing is such an important way that
men accomplish gender (Nock, 2001; Pyke, 1996), earning income often
means something different depending on whether it is done by a man or a
woman. Both men and women are more likely to see women’s income as
helping and providing as men’s responsibility, irrespective of what women
earn (Ferree, 1991; Potuchek, 1997; Weiss, 1987).
There is a broad social tension exerting its influence within families
because of “faster changing women and slower changing men” (Hochschild,
1989, p. 214). Does this lag apply to the breadwinning side of the work–
family interface as well as the domestic side? In contrast to housework,
936 Journal of Family Issues

providing brings prestige and money, though the providing duty may feel
stressful. Do these differences between housework and providing result in
more or less incongruence between providing attitudes and behavior com-
pared to the disjuncture reported for domestic work? Men are more able than
women to “get out of” domestic work (Coltrane, 2000); are they also more
likely to be the kind of provider they prefer? Does the traditional role of pro-
viding in establishing male identity affect the psychological consequences of
providing more or less than one prefers?
To answer these questions, there is a need for further study of behavior
and attitudes about providing, how they relate to one another, and with what
consequences. There have been some important studies of provider role
attitudes (e.g., Hood, 1986; Potuchek, 1997), but research on the personal
impact of incongruence in attitudes and behavior about providing is just
beginning (e.g., Perry-Jenkins, Seery, & Crouter, 1992). Such studies are
often based on small samples and only one sex–gender group.
For the current study, we use survey data from a study of gender, work,
and family among self-employed women and men to examine conse-
quences of provider role attitudes and behavior. These data include more
information on the provider attitudes and behavior of our sample than is
available in nationally representative data sets.
With typical labor market constraints factored out, the self-employed are
a useful focus for studying the gendered work–family nexus. Whatever the
paths that may have led to self-employment, the self-employed are some-
what freer to exercise their ideals about what kind of provider they want to
be (Moen & Yu, 2000). Thus, they provide a fairly stringent test of the
degree of incongruence between breadwinning attitudes and behavior. We
are able to make “real comparisons” (Rosenfeld, 2002) between women
and men not only because, as owners, respondents are in the same work sit-
uation, but also because in this sample they operate in the same limited
number of industries as well.
The data are limited by the fact that respondents are mostly White and
middle class. Yet given the variation in gender ideology and work and family
patterns by race and class (Landry, 2000), it is useful to focus on one group,
especially because the White middle class is the current site of change in the
breadwinner/homemaker family, as Landry and others point out.
We begin by examining patterns in various provider attitudes as well as
actual providing behavior. Then we look at outcomes of incongruence
between breadwinning behavior and attitudes. We compare women and
men throughout to assess how the social meanings attached to gender influ-
ence provider role preferences and behavior, and with what consequences.
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 937

Providing Attitudes and Behavior

Incongruence Between Attitudes and Behavior

People’s behavior is often at odds with their attitudes. When people
espouse a particular gender ideology but do not live it, they experience
incongruence between their attitudes and behavior (McHale & Crouter,
1992). Hochschild’s (1989) ethnographic study of domestic work revealed
that many women and men hold inconsistent attitudes and behavior about
who should be doing what for the family. Of course, one reason for such
inconsistencies is a lack of fit between how people actually live and over-
arching ideological scripts about how people should live.
Despite the shift to the dual-earner family as the dominant form, the
breadwinner/homemaker family has tremendous ideological staying power.
Hood (1986) defined the HEPR (husband as economic provider) as a
(White) upper-middle-class standard that has survived despite (White)
middle-class women’s entry into paid work and the much longer history of
paid work by less privileged women. The HEPR gets a symbolic boost
when, as happens periodically, the media tout domestic over paid work roles.
During the 1980s, for example, women’s magazines began to celebrate the
“new traditionalists”—women who gave up their jobs to devote themselves
to their children (Coontz, 1992). Statistics paint a different picture, showing
that women continue to be full participants in the labor force; record
numbers of mothers of very young children are working for pay, and only
19% of all families fit the HEPR model, according to one recent estimate
(Padavic & Reskin, 2002). Yet social institutions, from educational systems
to work structures, have not adapted to the behavioral decline of the HEPR,
continuing to operate as though the traditional gender division of labor still
exists (Moen & Orrange, 2002). Social norms continue to pressure women
to nurture and men to be good breadwinners (Jacobs & Gerson, 2004).
It is not surprising, then, that attitudes and behavior relating to the
provider role are often at odds. As Coltrane puts it, “the old gender ideals
tend to govern people’s thoughts and feelings, but the new economic and
social realities tend to govern people’s actions” (1998, p. 67). Hood’s
“ambivalent coproviders” illustrate this well. The group includes women
who had to take jobs to supplement their husbands’ earnings as well as pro-
fessional men married to upwardly mobile women who contribute more
than 40% of the family income (Hood, 1986, p. 356). The people who are
ambivalent coproviders distinguish between earning money and having the
responsibility to provide; they do not think of providing as women’s duty.
938 Journal of Family Issues

Only 15% of the employed women Potuchek (1997) studied were true
coproviders, sharing responsibility and valuing it. The most common type
of couple was a breadwinner husband and a wife who did not see her con-
tributions to family income as central to family needs or breadwinning as
her responsibility.
This disjuncture between women’s providing behavior and its interpreta-
tion by women and their husbands has surfaced in many studies. Intensive
interview studies with employed and self-employed men uncover many who
downplay their wives’ economic contributions to their family while shoring
up their sense of themselves as primary breadwinners (K. Gerson, 1993;
Weiss, 1987). A survey of 186 dual-earner families uncovered a general
reluctance of both husbands and wives, but especially husbands, to consider
the women coproviders (Spade, 1994). An in-depth interview study of self-
employed women and men found that a majority of the men took their status
as primary breadwinner for granted, using it to answer complaints that their
wives or girlfriends had about how much they work (Loscocco, 1997). Even
a substantial minority (almost one third) of the egalitarian couples studied by
Haas (1982) found it hard to accept that a wife should have the same duty to
provide as the husband. When it comes to providing, people’s attitudes are
often less egalitarian than their behavior.
The underlying reason for such findings appears to be the continued
importance of the role of good provider in establishing men’s gender iden-
tity (Brennan, Barnett, & Gareis, 2001; Pyke, 1996; Zuo, 2004; Zvonkovic,
Greaves, Schmiege, & Hall, 1996). Many, though certainly not all, men
(e.g., K. Gerson, 1993) find it important to establish themselves as men via
breadwinning, and some women expect this of the men with whom they
share their lives (Loscocco, 1997; Pyke, 1996). Qualitative and quantitative
studies of the self-employed hint at the importance of gender identity; freed
from the time demands of employers, men who work for themselves are
much more likely than their female counterparts to use their flexibility to
establish the primacy of work, whereas women are more likely to use it to
accommodate family or personal lives (Loscocco, 1997; Parasuraman,
Purohit, Godshalk, & Beutell, 1996; Seron & Ferris, 1995).
We expect no single pattern of incongruence in attitudes about gender
and providing. Some people are egalitarian on more general attitudes about
providing but more traditional when it comes to their own family; others
have the opposite pattern. In fact, Potuchek (1997) identified eight different
approaches to breadwinning among women and four different approaches
among men, based on patterns of responses to different kinds of questions
about providing.
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 939

Research findings imply that men are better able than women to decide
what kind of domestic role they will play (Coltrane, 2000); whether that it
also true for providing is unknown. There is evidence that women’s atti-
tudes about the gender division of family labor have changed more than
men’s (Hochschild, 1989), confirmed by recent studies of young adults.
K. Gerson (2002) found that one third of the young men, but far fewer of the
young women she interviewed, preferred traditional gender arrangements,
and “a large segment” of the men in law and MBA programs studied by
Orrange (2003) identify “to a significant extent” with the good provider role
(p. 21). Because women clearly bear the weight of the domestic side of the
incomplete change in work and family gender norms, they have more incen-
tive to welcome change, but that does not necessarily extend all the way to
seeing providing as their duty. Given that being a good provider continues to
establish masculine identity (Brennan et al., 2001; Pyke, 1996; Zuo, 2004),
men may cling to that role or may take on more of the providing than they
prefer. The possibility that men get stuck in the good provider role is raised
by a study showing that the gap between preferred hours and actual hours
worked is greater for men than for women (Moen & Yu, 2000).

Consequences of Incongruence
One reason for concern about the stall in social change regarding the
breadwinner/homemaker model is the likelihood that incongruence between
attitudes and behavior has negative consequences for individuals. Past
research offers alternative views about such consequences and whether they
are similar or different for women and men. The two most commonly dis-
cussed outcomes are psychological well-being and marital quality.
One of the earliest studies was conducted by Ross, Mirowsky, and Huber
(1983), who looked at the effects of both husbands’ and wives’ attitudes
about the wife’s employment on their own well-being. They found women
to be depressed if they preferred employment but were staying home,
whereas men were depressed if their wives were working against their hus-
bands’ preferences.
Some past research suggests that even if more women than men are frus-
trated in their attempts to live up to their gender ideology, they may be less
likely than men to experience negative consequences of incongruence in
providing. Given the continued salience of being a good provider to men’s
gender identity, the emotional well-being of men who do not provide as
much as they think they should may be adversely affected, whereas women
have alternative sources of identity and fulfillment that men do not (Hertz,
1986). Young women are more realistic than men about the possibility that
940 Journal of Family Issues

they will not be able to have the work and family lives that they want
(K. Gerson, 2002; Orrange, 2003). If they are more prepared and more flex-
ible, perhaps women are better able to cope with incongruence between
beliefs about gender norms, their ideals about how much they should pro-
vide, and how much they actually do contribute. Men might be affected
more by incongruence than women because it is men who are “held account-
able” for being good providers (Jacobs & Gerson, 2001; Pyke, 1996).
Other findings suggest that providing more or less than they want may
not have much impact on men’s sense of well-being. For instance, Nock
(2001) argues that as long as they are providing, men get to assert their
claim to adult masculinity; men’s work satisfies the normative expectations,
irrespective of their wives’ earnings.
Research on marital quality, though rarely specifically about attitude–
behavior incongruence, suggests alternative scenarios of how incongruence
would affect people’s feelings about their marriage or spouse. Some researchers
have suggested that husband as breadwinner couples have the most marital
stability and, by extension, the best marital quality (Brennan et al., 2001).
Nock (2001) looks at what he calls “marriages of equally dependent spouses,”
defined as each person contributing 40% or more of total family earnings.
Women in these marriages have higher chances of divorce and lower com-
mitment to the marriage than other women (they can imagine leaving), but
this pattern does not hold for men. Implicit in these findings is the notion that
men benefit more from marriage, and women who are financially independent
are freer to express unhappiness in their marriages. This highlights that both
objective and subjective measures of breadwinning are important.
Wilkie and colleagues found that when men do a disproportionate share
of breadwinning, they have a heightened sense of unfairness, and this
reduces their marital satisfaction (Wilkie, Ferree, & Ratcliff, 1998). This
implies that incongruence between how much men think they should be
providing and how much they actually provide will affect men’s evaluation
of their marriages.
Perry-Jenkins and colleagues analyze survey data from 43 middle-class
White families to examine the impact of provider status on both emotional
well-being and marital quality (Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990; Perry-Jenkins
et al., 1992). A study of the men from these families used Hood’s conceptu-
alization of provider status. Main providers who did little housework and
coproviders who did a substantial amount were happiest with their marriages
(Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990). This establishes that consistent behavior
across the two domains of domestic and paid work is important for these
men; it remains to be seen whether congruence in attitudes and behavior
within the breadwinning domain has similar importance.
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 941

The analyses of women (Perry-Jenkins et al., 1992) identified four dif-

ferent groups: secondary providers, whose income is icing on the cake and
who believe in a traditional homemaker/provider model; ambivalent coproviders;
coproviders; and homemakers. Ambivalent coproviders had the highest lev-
els of depression, the second highest levels of role overload, and the lowest
levels of marital satisfaction. Women in main/secondary provider house-
holds reported high rates of overload and depression, yet they also had the
highest levels of marital satisfaction. These women’s acceptance of a tradi-
tional gender division of labor may preserve marital harmony even in the
face of their heavy domestic workload.
Studies of behavior–attitude incongruence in both the domestic and the
paid work sphere suggest that there are other variables to consider in models
of the consequences of a lack of fit between provider attitudes and behavior.
Both family need and the presence of children may directly influence emo-
tional well-being (Bird, 1999; Robinson & Spitze, 1992) and marital quality
(Bradbury, Fincham, & Beach, 2000). Physical health is apt to be linked to
emotional health. People with more education tend to have better emotional
health, even when family income is held constant (Rietschlin, 1998; Robinson
& Spitze, 1992). Age is likely to be correlated with physical health but may
have an independent effect on emotional health.
Past research shows that behavior and attitudes toward providing are in a
state of flux and also that the social construction of gender is an important
part of this process. We use a larger sample of women and men than has been
studied to date to examine not only general attitudes about providing, but also
how much responsibility people feel to provide and who they think should be
the provider for their own family. We compare women’s and men’s general
ideas about whose duty it is to provide, beliefs about how providing should
be distributed in one’s own family, and how much people actually do provide.
Then we investigate whether incongruence between attitudes and behavior
affects women’s and men’s well-being and marital quality.

Data and Method

Sample
Our study sample comes from the 1998–1999 Upstate New York Small
Business Project. A major goal of the study was to examine how family and
work intersect to shape the economic and personal lives of women and
men who employ themselves. Respondents were asked a variety of different
942 Journal of Family Issues

questions about the provider role, so the data are well suited to the questions
we have raised thus far. The study began with a qualitative phase. This
included interviews with several local leaders who provide services or advo-
cate for small business owners, time in the field observing small business own-
ers at work, and an intensive interview study of 30 small business owners.
Data gleaned from this qualitative phase helped to hone the research questions
that framed the study and to improve the validity of the survey instrument.
For the larger survey, participants were drawn randomly from lists of
small businesses (defined as having 100 or fewer employees) compiled by
two companies that track business activity. The sampling frame was limited
to six industries in order to control for the tremendous variation that exists by
business type, much of it correlated with gender (Hundley, 2001; Loscocco
& Robinson, 1991). Roughly equal numbers of women and men were sought
for the study. Trained interviewers conducted structured, face-to-face inter-
views with the owner-operators of 643 small businesses. Unfortunately, time
and funding constraints did not permit oversampling of people of color, nor
was a proposed follow-up study of spouses ultimately feasible. The overall
response rate was 51% for men and 58% for women, though there was con-
siderable variation by industry. Data were collected on business age, business
size, and owner sex from 477 people who refused to participate. Analyses
comparing the participants and nonparticipants show no significant differ-
ences in business age or business size. However, men were significantly more
likely to refuse than women, as the response rates show.
For these analyses, we use data from only those who were currently liv-
ing with a partner, which yields 236 women and 274 men. We also exclude
50 men and 5 women whose spouses or domestic partners were not
employed, in order to make gender comparisons more parallel. Almost all
are White, non-Latino. The median age of the women of this sample at the
time of the interview was 46.2, and for men it was 49.8. Most of the parents
in the sample are raising school-aged children and teenagers (39.8% of the
women and 35.8% of the men) or have already launched their children.
Only 12.3% of the women and 16.4% of the men had a child younger than
6 years old. The mean family income of the men is $100,000 and of the
women, $82,834. They are a highly educated group: 70.5% of the men and
72.7% of the women have more than a high school education.

Measures
Measures for reports about providing in the respondent’s own household
are adapted from Hood (1986) and Potuchek (1997). Respondents were asked
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 943

an open-ended question: “Ideally, who do you think should be the financial

provider for your family?” These were coded into six responses: the respon-
dent as either sole or main provider, the respondent’s spouse as sole or main
provider, both spouses equally, or it should not matter. How much respon-
dents actually provide for their families is measured by the percentage of the
total family income that they contribute and by an item that asks, “Who is the
financial provider for your family? Do you mostly provide, does your
spouse/partner mostly provide, or do you share providing?” As others have
established, the absolute amount that a spouse provides is not nearly as
important as their share (K. Gerson, 1993; Wilkie et al., 1998).
Two items that have been used routinely in the General Social Survey
assess gender norms about providing. These ask how much respondents
agree or disagree that “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is
the major earner and the woman takes care of the home and children” and
“Women have a duty to provide economically for the family.”
We use three dependent variables: marital quality, life satisfaction, and
anxiety. Marital quality is assessed with the sum of three items (Kessler,
1985, as cited in Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992) that use a 4-point scale
of marital stressors (1 = a great deal and 4 = not at all): “How much can
you depend on your spouse/partner to be there when you really need
him/her?” “How much concern does your spouse/partner show for your
feelings?” and “How much tension is there between you and your
spouse/partner?” Life satisfaction is a single item: “Overall, how satisfied
are you with how you spend your life these days: very satisfied, somewhat
satisfied, or not very satisfied?” Psychological well-being is tapped by the
sum of six items that assess anxiety from the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist
(Derogatis, Lipman, Rickels, Uhlenhuth, & Covi, 1974).
Control variables include a 4-point measure of perceived physical health,
ranging from poor to excellent (Ross & Mirowsky, 1995), years of educa-
tion, age in years, measures of the number of preschool and the number of
school-aged children in the household, and family income in thousands of
dollars. We also include a measure of hours per week the respondents work
in their business on average and a measure of the respondents’ share of
housework. This is calculated from the respondent’s report of how many
hours the respondent and his or her domestic partner spend on a list of 13
tasks in a typical week (cleaning house, preparing meals, shopping, doing
dishes, paying bills, laundry, maintenance, repair, organizing household
chores, planning family activities, caring for elderly family members, dri-
ving family members, and child care). To create the share of housework
measure, the various tasks were first summed to obtain measures of time
944 Journal of Family Issues

Table 1
Measures Related to Provider Status,
Dual-Earner Women, and Men
Women Men

General attitudes about breadwinning

Better if man is major earner
Agree or strongly agree 25.5% 23.2%
Women have duty to provide
Disagree or strongly disagree 26.3% 54.0%
Subjective measures related to own household
Who should be provider in your household
Self sole or main 1.3% 42.6%
Spouse sole or main 24.8% 1.8%
Both 73.9% 55.6%
Who is provider in family
Self mostly 15.6% 46.6%
Spouse mostly 36.8% 4.9%
Share 47.6% 48.4%
Objective measure of breadwinning
Own % of family income 35.2% 65.0%
N 231 224

spent on household work by the respondent and by the partner, and then the
respondent’s share of the total was calculated.

Analyses
First, we use descriptive statistics to examine abstract and specific atti-
tudes about providing as well as how much providing respondents do. Then
we evaluate models of the impact of incongruence between provider pref-
erences and behavior on emotional well-being and marital quality using
multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression.

Findings

Descriptive Results on Attitudes and Behavior

Gender differences in the distributions of measures relating to the
provider role are shown in Table 1. Only about a quarter of each gender
agrees that men should be the major earners in households and that women
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 945

should take care of the home. Similarly, about one quarter of women dis-
agree with the statement that women have a duty to provide, another tradi-
tional position. However, just more than half of men disagree that women
have a duty to provide.
When asked about their own household, men are split almost equally
between those who feel they should be the main or sole provider and those
who feel providing should be shared. In contrast, three quarters of women
favor shared providing, with only a quarter feeling that their spouse should
be the sole or main provider. When men are asked who actually provides,
about half state that they are the main or sole provider, and about half
describe shared provision. Figures for women on shared provision are sim-
ilar: About half say they share providing with husbands or partners.
However, just more than a third say their spouse is the main provider, in
contrast to men’s greater likelihood of describing themselves in this man-
ner. Finally, we report the percentage of family income earned by the
respondent as a more objective measure of providing. On average, men
respondents bring in 65% and women 35%, reflecting a similar situation
across the two sets of households.
To what extent do men and women feel that their own preferences for
breadwinning in their household are being carried out? About a third of
men who would prefer to be the main earner are in shared-earner house-
holds (see Table 2). Similarly, about a third of men who would like to share
breadwinning are main or sole earners. Among women who want their
spouse to be the main provider, one sixth see themselves as the main
provider and about a quarter see that responsibility as shared. Almost one
third of the women who prefer to share providing in their household see
their spouse as the main provider, and just under one in seven sees herself
as the main provider.
Based on this evidence of incongruence between preferences and actual-
ity, we construct a measure of provider role congruence. We report percent-
ages of men and women who are playing the kind of provider role they prefer,
as well as those who would prefer a lesser or greater role than they say they
have. Table 3 shows that men are more likely to be congruent main providers
than are women (just more than one quarter compared to a handful), whereas
more women then men are congruent coproviders (more than two fifths, com-
pared to about one third). There were no congruent secondary providers
among men. For clarity, the three women who are congruent main providers
are deleted from the multivariate analyses in the next section.
Overall, very similar percentages of men and women are providing more
or less than they want to. Approximately one in five men and one in five
946 Journal of Family Issues

Table 2
Who Is the Best Provider for Your Household,
by Who Is the Provider in Your Household, by Gender
Who Is the Provider in the Household?

Best Provider in Household Self Spouse Shared Total

Women
Self 100.0% 100.0% (N = 3)
Spouse 17.5% 56.1% 26.3% 100.0% (N = 57)
Both 13.5% 31.2% 55.3% 100.0% (N = 170)
Men
Self 63.2% 3.2% 33.7% 100.0% (N = 95)
Spouse 100.0% 100.0% (N = 4)
Both 31.7% 6.5% 61.8% 100.0% (N = 123)

Table 3
Respondent Satisfaction With Provider Role, by Gender
Provider Satisfaction Men Women

Providing more than wants toa 19.2% 20.9%

Congruent secondary providerb 0.0% 13.9%
Congruent main providerc 26.8% 1.3%
Congruent coproviderd 33.9% 40.9%
Providing less than wants toe 19.2% 23.0%
Total 100.0% 100.0%
N 222 230

a. Best is spouse, provider is self or shared; best is both, provider is self.

b. Best is spouse, provider is spouse.
c. Best is self, provider is self.
d. Best is both, providing is shared.
e. Best is self, provider is spouse or providing is shared; best is both, provider is spouse.

women fall into each of these categories. Thus, when preferences for
respondents’ own household are compared to their reported situation, a sub-
stantial minority of each gender group is playing either a lesser or a greater
role in providing than they prefer. Previous studies have tended to focus on
women’s frustration with their husband’s reluctance to participate in an
egalitarian arrangement in household labor; it is important to see whether
incongruence about providing has negative consequences as well. We turn
now to a consideration of whether men’s and women’s satisfaction with
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 947

Table 4
Unstandardized Regression Coefficients for Effects of
Provider Role on Psychological Well-Being and Marital
Quality for Male Business Owners
Independent Variable Anxiety Life Satisfaction Marital Quality

Provider role satisfaction

Providing too much .50 −.27 −.31
Congruent main provider .92** −.23 −.25
Providing too little .75* −.26 −.001
Health −.49** −.27** .05
Education .10 .01 .04
Age −.05** .01 .02*
Child 0–5 years in household .18 −.10 −.01
Child 6–18 years in household .02 −.16* −.28**
Family income $1000s −.003* .003** .001
Share of housework .19 .03 −.23
Hours worked in business .02** −.01** −.002
Constant 3.56 2.74 6.40
R2 .10 .12 .07

Note: Reference category is congruent coprovider.

*p < .10. **p < .05.

their provider roles affects their psychological well-being or the quality of

their marriages.

Regression Results
In Tables 4 and 5, we present regression results for the effects of
provider role satisfaction and other control variables on men’s and women’s
anxiety, life satisfaction, and marital quality. As Table 4 shows, being a con-
gruent main provider increases men’s anxiety compared to those who are
congruent coproviders. Although these good providers may have a sense of
satisfaction derived from fulfilling their self-defined appropriate role, they
appear to pay a price in anxiety. Similarly, men who are unable to play as
central a role in providing as they would like (providing too little) feel more
anxiety (marginally significant). Those who are playing more of a provid-
ing role than they want are not significantly different from the happy
coproviders.
Other significant predictors of men’s anxiety are worse health, being
younger, having a lower family income, and working more hours per week
948 Journal of Family Issues

Table 5
Unstandardized Regression Coefficients for Effects
of Provider Role on Psychological Well-Being and
Marital Quality for Female Business Owners
Independent Variable Anxiety Life Satisfaction Marital Quality

Provider role satisfaction

Providing too much .07 .42** .32
Congruent secondary provider .27 −.14 −.35
Providing too little −.49 −.05 −.19
Health −.50** .43** .06
Education .18** −.01 .03
Age −.005 .01 −.002
Child 0–5 years in household .40 −.10 .15
Child 6–18 years in household −.002 −.008 −.15
Family income $1000s −.002 −.001 .003*
Share of housework −.75 −.09 −1.07*
Hours worked in business .004 −.007 −.006
Constant 2.17 2.56 7.73
R2 .02 .06 .01

Note: Reference category is congruent coprovider.

*p < .10. **p < .05.

in the business. Our measures of provider role incongruence have stan-

dardized coefficients in the same range as those for health and income (.09
to .19 vs. −.12 to −.14) and somewhat lower than that for age (−.24). Thus,
they seem to be important predictors of men’s well-being. In contrast (Table
5), women’s provider role incongruence has no significant influence on
their anxiety levels, and levels of explained variance are lower. Other pre-
dictors for women are worse health and higher education.
There are no significant effects of provider role congruence on men’s
life satisfaction (Table 4), but among women, those who are playing more
of a role than they would choose have lower life satisfaction (Table 5).
Women’s life satisfaction is influenced by their share of providing, and it is
those who are playing a larger role than they wish whose satisfaction is
lower. Previous studies have found women who are less traditional than
their husbands to be most affected, but these studies tended also to focus on
women who are doing more housework than they would prefer. Perhaps,
given that women are typically doing more than their share of the house-
work, the additional burden of more providing than they would choose
becomes problematic. It is interesting that men’s anxiety levels, but not
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 949

their satisfaction with life in general, are influenced by incongruence in the

provider role.
Better health leads to greater life satisfaction among both gender groups.
For men, additional significant predictors of life satisfaction are not having
a school-aged child at home, working fewer hours in the business, and
higher family income.
There are no effects of provider role congruence on marital quality for
men or women. Perhaps those who are doing more or less providing than
they would prefer do not view this as a reflection on their spouse. Among
other variables, significant predictors of marital quality for women include
both income and their share of housework (both marginally significant). For
men, having a school-aged child in the home decreases marital quality,
whereas age (marginally) increases it.
Given that provider role congruence is related to some aspects of respon-
dents’ well-being, we conducted a bivariate analysis to examine whether
there were subgroups of respondents who are more or less likely to be in a
provider role that is congruent with their preferences. Results not shown
reveal no significant relationships between provider role satisfaction and
education or health. However, there is a relationship between the presence
of minor children and women’s provider role satisfaction: Women who are
providing more than they want are the group least likely to have children at
home, whereas women who are congruent secondary providers are the
group that is most likely to do so.
We also examined whether two measures of gender-role attitudes were
related to provider role preferences (whether they think it is better for the
man to be the breadwinner of the family, and whether they believe preschool
children suffer when their mothers work). Results for both measures suggest
that men with more egalitarian attitudes are more likely to be congruent
coproviders and less likely to be congruent main providers than more tradi-
tional men. Similarly, women with more egalitarian attitudes are more likely
to be congruent coproviders and are less likely to be congruent secondary
providers than more traditional women.

Discussion and Conclusion

Our analyses uncovered both gender differences and gender similarities

in the meaning and influence of the provider role in the lives of these self-
employed men and women. The overall results reinforce and clarify the
notion that providing is embedded in gender relations (e.g., K. Gerson,
1993; Potuchek, 1997; Spade, 1994).
950 Journal of Family Issues

As past research has shown, women have been in the forefront of changes
in attitudes and behavior associated with the domestic side of the work–family
system. It has been documented that women would like men to do more
housework (Coltrane, 2000), and many women are sharing the burden of paid
employment. Yet past research has not established the extent to which men and
women are ready to share the responsibility for financial provision. The
women surveyed for this study are more apt than the men to view providing
for family as something that women should do, and more women than men
prefer to be coproviders themselves. Furthermore, the men are much more
likely than the women to be congruent main providers, whereas there are more
women than men who are congruent coproviders. Still, at least for the people
studied here, there is evidence of willingness to share the provider role.
Majorities of both women and men prefer to share providing, and more than a
third of both gender groups have such an arrangement.
We asked whether men would be more likely than women to be provid-
ing as much as they want to. The answer is no, as there were similar per-
centages of women and men in incongruent provider positions. The incongruence
in providing that we uncovered is noteworthy because our sample of fairly
affluent self-employed men and women have more opportunity than the
average employee to exercise their providing preferences (e.g., Moen &
Yu, 2000). This is apt to be especially true of women, for whom inequality
in paid work is well documented, suggesting that overarching gender
norms are an important part of the story about incongruence in providing
attitudes and behavior. Consistent with research on other samples (Potuchek,
1997), there are a variety of incongruent patterns for both gender groups;
some women and some men are providing more than they want to, and other
men and women are providing less than they want to. This contrasts with
research on housework, showing that women are typically the ones doing
more housework than they want to (Hochschild, 1989; Robinson & Spitze,
1992). Thus, women do not bear the brunt of unrealized expectations in the
breadwinning domain, but neither do men, even though this is “their”
domain.
The consequences of incongruence for the self-employed women and
men we studied show that providing is still a key way for men to establish
gender identity, confirming the results of past research (e.g., Brennan et al.,
2001; Pyke, 1996; Zuo, 2004). Providing plays a bigger role in these men’s
than in these women’s lives, even though all are actively engaged in com-
merce. The men who are unable to be as much of a provider as they want are
more anxious, but those who are doing more providing than they would like
are not more anxious than the congruent coproviders. The importance of the
provider role to male identity apparently overshadows a lack of fit between
 Loscocco, Spitze / Gender and Provider Roles 951

provider attitudes and behavior. Yet the provider role has a downside for
some. There are men in our sample who would like less responsibility for
providing, and even those who want to play the role of main provider expe-
rience more anxiety than willing coproviders. It is interesting that incongru-
ence affects life satisfaction among these women but not among the men,
whereas it did affect men’s anxiety levels. Clearly, these outcome variables
tap different dimensions, and future research is needed to understand how
these are tied to incongruence in providing and why they vary by gender.
It is also noteworthy that incongruence has no impact on marital quality.
This may be due to our use of a measure that asks about the respondent’s
spouse rather than the more typical global questions about marital satisfac-
tion (e.g., Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990; Perry-Jenkins et al., 1992; Wilkie
et al., 1998). Yet it is also possible that decision making about how much
providing each person in a couple feels they are doing is more constrained
by outside forces. In contrast, dissatisfaction with the division of household
work is easier to blame on a recalcitrant spouse. Perhaps incongruent pro-
viding situations are viewed as due to the overall economic climate, avail-
ability of child care, the gender distribution of well-paying jobs, and other
circumstances beyond the control of either spouse. In fact, Wilkie and col-
leagues (1998) conclude that the division of labor in the paid work realm is
less contentious than the division of labor in the family realm. The negative
effect of share of housework on marital quality among women suggests that
the measure can tap discontent, though perhaps not as much as a more
global marital satisfaction measure.
That our sample consists of women and men engaged in the same kinds
of work activity in the same industries underscores the continued relevance
of gender as a master social status. The gender differences in providing atti-
tudes and behavior, and the impact of incongruence between them, must
result from overarching gender processes. Given that we found a similar
variety of patterns of incongruence as in past studies of employed people,
it appears that the self-employed do not have a different view of providing
than their employed counterparts. Gender norms, and the patterns of atti-
tudes and behavior that result, seem to carry from the realm of employment
to that of self-employment (Loscocco, 1997).
Our conclusions apply only to this sample of self-employed, mostly
White and middle-class women and men. We hope that the measures,
models, and findings of this study will stimulate further research on
the providing component of the gendered work–family system. Data on
provider role attitudes and behavior from larger, nationally representative,
and more diverse samples are essential to fuller understanding of this topic.
952 Journal of Family Issues

It would be interesting to see how traditional homemaker–breadwinner

families fit into the picture. There is also reason to believe that the gender
patterns would be different among the groups, such as African Americans,
that have pioneered the two-earner family form (Landry, 2000).
Unfortunately, we were unable to examine directly the role of spouses’
attitudes toward providing. Related studies show the usefulness of doing so
(e.g., Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990; Wilkie et al., 1998). We need much
better explanations for why some women and men are more able to match
their beliefs about how much they should be providing and how much
they actually do provide. Key foci of further investigation might be the inter-
play of gendered processes of negotiation among couples, gender account-
ability to cultural norms, and the constraints and opportunities presented by
family and paid work situations. In-depth studies of how couples negotiate
and experience the allocation of providing in their families would facilitate
understanding of these processes.
Finally, there is a need for more fully developed models of the conse-
quences of provider role incongruence on marital quality and psychologi-
cal well-being, as we were unable to explain much variance in these
dependent variables, especially for women. Perhaps future research will
conclude that incongruence in providing attitudes and behavior is more
important to other psychological outcomes, particularly among women.
This study has shown that patterns of incongruence in provider attitudes
and behavior operate differently from the housework dimension. These men
and women are equally likely to be providing more or less than they would
like. Unlike patterns in the housework domain, the men are not any more
likely than the women to be exercising their preferences, nor are they try-
ing very hard to share more of the providing duty, as women do with house-
work. On the contrary, these self-employed women are more willing to
share the provider role than are the men. Men’s continued accountability to
good provider norms appears to underlie the gender differences that surface
even among men and women in similar work situations.

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