Marriages in which wives outearn their husbands are not only more common, but less likely to end in divorce than in the past.

Couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s were 70% more likely to divorce when wives earned the same or slightly more than their husbands compared with couples where the husband earned more, according to research from Christine Schwartz and Pilar Gonalons-Pons, sociologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. For couples married in the 1990s, however, the divorce rate for those with female breadwinners had fallen to 4% higher than male breadwinners.