Mariana is a lawyer at a regional international trade firm. She earns twice as much as her partner, a freelance graphic designer. They’ve been living together in San José, Costa Rica, for 4 years. Every morning, Mariana wakes up before 6 a.m., has coffee, checks her emails, and leaves. He stays. She pays the rent and most of the expenses, and even so, she says she feels guilty about mentioning her raise out loud.
“I avoid talking about money because I don’t want him to feel inferior. He’s already told me he doesn’t like to be ‘reminded’ that I cover everything. I don’t do it to humiliate him, but I also shouldn’t feel ashamed of what I earn,” she confesses.
This story is not unique. In fact, it’s increasingly common. As women gain ground in the professional and academic worlds, they face the paradox that being successful can make others uncomfortable—not society in the abstract, but within their intimate relationships. Not because of the money itself, but because of what that money represents in a culture that still associates power, worth, and manhood with the ability to provide.
In countries like Mexico, Chile, Argentina, or Colombia, wage parity advances have not been accompanied by an equivalent cultural transformation. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) warns that in Latin America, although women have progressed in education and income, this progress has not translated into proportional domestic power, and economic autonomy does not guarantee emotional respect or shared responsibility.
The wounded masculinity
For many men, income remains the central axis of their self-worth. According to a 2024 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, when a woman earns more than her heterosexual partner, both tend to lie in surveys: she underreports her salary, he overreports his. They do so because of social pressure that defines masculine identity around economic superiority.
The tension manifests as silences, guilt, hidden or open conflicts. It seems that the male ego is not always ready to inhabit a secondary economic role without feeling that he is losing authority or relevance.
Women, for their part, have learned to “soften” their success. I see it often in my leadership workshops. Many hide what they earn, minimize their achievements, or refrain from openly discussing their professional progress so as not to make their partner uncomfortable. Writer Rebecca Solnit calls this the “Cassandra syndrome,” because when she shines, she disrupts, and when she empowers herself, she destabilizes.
Are we truly a modern society?
In public, the narrative of equality moves forward. We celebrate the professional, independent, empowered woman. But in private—in the bedroom, at the dinner table, in the silences on WhatsApp—that independence often becomes a source of friction.
The study “Relative Income and Gender Norms: Evidence from Latin America” shows that couples are more likely to separate when the woman earns more than the man and concludes that it’s not just about money, but about cultural norms that influence how roles and responsibilities are distributed within the home. These findings underline that “equality policies cannot be limited to opening job opportunities or facilitating access to credit; they must also question and change social expectations about who should provide and who should care.”
According to a Harvard Business Review study, professionally successful women have more difficulty finding stable partners—not because of them, but because of how their success is perceived; not due to lack of affection, but due to a mismatch between female success and traditional models of masculinity. Successful women are seen as “too independent,” “bossy,” or “intimidating.”
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild spoke as early as 1989 about the “second shift” for women—formal work plus domestic work. Today many women face a triple tension: working outside the home, sustaining the household, and managing the emotions of a partner who does not know how to live in equality.
When a woman is the one sustaining the household economically, classic models are disrupted. Who makes decisions? How is power redistributed? Is emotional labor or a man’s domestic management equally valued?
In many cases, female headship in households is not a choice, but the result of male omission. In Latin America, millions of women become the sole economic provider not because they want to, but because they have no alternative. Data shows an increasing trend of households with female heads or in which the woman is the primary breadwinner, especially in vulnerable areas.
However, although there are no definitive figures, existing studies indicate that women earning more than men is a growing but still minority phenomenon in many populations. In other words, the gender gap that disadvantages women persists because gender norms, social expectations, and structural inequality in employment create barriers that prevent many women from achieving this. But when they do achieve it, they face symbolic resistance that makes it difficult to express it naturally (such as hiding their income, minimizing achievements, etc.). Studies like the one on Relative Income make this clear.
How do we build more symmetrical relationships?
Back to Mariana. One day, her partner asked that if they spoke about work in front of friends, she not mention her job title. “He asked me to say we do the same kind of work. He made me feel guilty for growing,” she recalls. Today, Mariana is considering living alone. Not because she doesn’t love him, but because she’s tired of carrying the guilt of success. And there lies the paradox: the woman who breaks glass ceilings often ends up trapped in an emotional cage where her success weighs, hurts, and is silenced.
The problem is not that a woman earns more. It’s that we are still socialized to believe that the man should be the primary provider, and that cultural expectation operates as an invisible pillar that structures intimate relationships. When a woman earns more, it’s not just a financial shift, but a symbolic challenge to the machismo that dictates that the man loses the central role assigned to him.
It is time to build more symmetrical relationships, where one’s success is not the other’s wound, but a shared effort, where the question is not who brings the bread home, but how we share it.
Autor
Psicóloga. Master en Políticas Públicas con enfoque de género. Especialista en Transformación Cultural y Coaching Ontológico. Directora de FeminismoINC. Autora de "Incomodar para Transformar" y "Atrevidas: Manual de trabajo personal por el activismo feminista".
