Study shows it is wives who are in charge at home

MANY men have secretly known it for years, but were too proud to admit it to their friends or, more importantly, themselves.

All women knew it but just let their male cohabitants live in ignorance.

But a US study has shown that women are the bosses of the home.

“Wearing the trousers” and “being the man of the house” are idle boasts if the results of Iowa State University research are anything to go by.

The study showed that wives have more power than their husbands in making decisions and dominating discussions.

The researchers surveyed 72 married couples in which the spouses were an average of 33 years old and had been married for about seven years.

Each spouse answered questions about relationship satisfaction and overall decision-making ability. Then, each spouse noted a relationship problem that could not be resolved without the spouse’s co-operation. While money and housework were popular picks, sex didn’t come up much as a marital issue.

Topics chosen by husbands and wives included: money 18% (husbands)/13% (wives); housework 15%/15%; friends and family 10%/19%; time together 13%/10%; making decisions 18%/4%; sex 4%/1%; intimacy 1%/1%; children (husbands never chose this topic)/3%; and other relationship changes 4%/17%.

The scientists videotaped the couples while they discussed each of the issues for 10 minutes and found that wives were more demanding — asking for changes in the relationship or in their partner — and were more likely to get their way than the husbands. This held regardless of who had chosen the issue.

“It wasn’t just that the women were bringing up issues that weren’t being responded to, but that the men were actually going along with what they said,” said David Vogel, a psychologist at Iowa State University. “Women were communicating more powerful messages, and men were responding to those messages by agreeing or giving in.

“Most of the research literature in psychology has suggested that women have less power. They have largely based that on the fact that traditionally men earn more money and so therefore would have the ability to make big decisions in the relationship. That wasn’t the case in this study.”