Quite recently I made a post asking if there's a catch with apparently enormously frequent occurrence of female breadwinners in the US. The responses varied by the level of insight; the next reasonable step is to look if there's also a catch with overall picture of prevalence of female breadwinners in the US.

Lo and behold, there is.

Based on a comment earlier today.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2017/home.htm

The source of popular "almost 40% of married women are breadwinners" claim.

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-families/f22.xlsx

Another dataset derived from the same Current Population Survey and slightly fresher.

You may notice the disparity, and make a simple conclusion:

"The percent of women being the majority earner ... 38%" - is simply not true, since it's derived only from couples where at least the wife is employed (while husband may or may not be).

The "29%" estimate comes from couples where both are employed. Guess what. It's still an overestimation.

BOTH estimates EXCLUDE families where the wife has no wage income.

When we look at Census link, and (for simplicity) stick with year 2015, we see that there were

60,258 thousand married heterosexual couples, and among them

9,454 thousand had the wife earning more than her husband.

Which is merely 15.6 (fifteen point six) percent of married heretosexual couples, which basically stood unchanged beyond noise oscillation since 2009, and translates into less than one in six. The estimate has reached 16.1 percent in 2021, apparently for the first time ever, but it's still nowhere near 20, 30, or 40 percent, and is quite similar to earlier French estimates I dug up from 2012, showing that around 15 percent of married couples in France have any arrangement other than "husband is either a breadwinner or co-breadwinner more likely to earn more than his spouse".

As per 2015 data (when the "40%" myth started being circulated), 36,772 thousand couples had at least wife having wage income, 32,287 thousand couples with both spouses having wage income, and 60,258 thousand couples overall.

Which tells us that there were 4,485 thousand couples with husband having no wage income, versus 23,486 thousand couples with wife having no wage income (or 1 in 13 versus 1 in 2.5).

I did not get arsed to dig these numbers earlier because both BLS and Census are inaccessible from my place of residence, and I had to first find a walkaround to reach these pages.

Quoting from BLS site,

"The proportion of wives earning more than their husbands has grown also. In 1987, 18 percent of working wives earned more than their working spouses; in 2015, 29 percent of wives earned more than their husbands."

The last part is clearly misleading.

The question I pose for discussion is this:

Why? Why would a governmental agency of a country that is presumably a patriarchy post misleading statements overestimating the levels of women's economic power and independence?

EDIT: since I either mistakenly submitted this post as CMV or mods have changed it,

this poster: https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/111mxpn/the_red_pill_believes_in_a_concept_called/

postulates that abundance of female breadwinners defeats the core idea of The Red Pill.

Since abundance of female breadwinners is non-existent, The Red Pill stands undefeated.

EDIT2: We're having an actual woman misled by a podcast based on an article by another woman that misinterpreted the data because it was... well, presented in highly misinterpretable way. So, I ignore any notion that (ackshully) the presentation is not misleading, or that it's not the governmental statistics agency's work to make their data presentable.

Other examples of repetitions of the same numbers without the mention that wives not having wage income are excluded (edit3) OR their actual share among households:

Forbes

New York Post

EDIT3:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/media-relations-and-communications/press-releases/when-women-earn-more-than-their-husbands

"Women outearn their husbands in nearly a quarter of households with spouses between 18 and 65 years old, according to data from the 2010 American Community Survey." - Emily Lambert, Associate Director of Intellectual Capital at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-21/does-marriage-success-rely-on-this-income-sweet-spot/11724140

"In places like the US, the percentage of wives out-earning their husbands is growing. In 1980, only 13 per cent of married women earned about as much or more than their husbands. In 2000, that figure almost doubled to 25 per cent, and in 2017 it was 31 per cent." - Joanna Syrda, Assistant Professor, University of Bath.