(RNN) – Does the truth hurt or are we just bad at numbers?
A new Census Bureau report, “Manning up and womaning down: How husbands and wives report their earnings when she earns more,” says both men and women lie about how much women get paid.
The research compared census data to tax forms for straight couples.
The report found that in marriages where the wife earned more, both the husband and the wife tended to exaggerate his earnings and dock her income.
Take a husband in Fargo, N.D., who lives in a household where the wife earns more. If he reported annual earnings of $30,000, he would tell the Census Bureau he earned more -- an average $30,870 during that same year. That’s $870 more than his earnings as reported by his employer(s).
Let us say, for example, that the same man’s wife earns $40,000. On average, her reported earnings would be equivalent to $39,400, around $600 less than she actually earned – U.S. Census Bureau
According to the report, men inflate their pay by an average of 2.9 percent when their wife makes more. At the same time, women deflate theirs by about 1.5 percent when their husbands make less.
The study said the wife earns more than the husband in about 23 percent of couples.
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