The good news is, median wages for two-parent families have gone up 23% since 1975. The bad news is, that's not because wages are higher. It's because, in 2009, the average two-parent family worked 26% more hours than they did in 1975, according to the
Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project:
Families earning the median income now work about 3500 hours, on average, compared to 2800 hours in 1975. The 26 percent increase in hours worked mainly reflects increases in work outside of the home among women. In fact, among two-parent families with median earnings, the hours of men were relatively constant over time, while hours worked by women more than doubled from 1975 to 2009. It was this increased contribution to work outside of the home, mostly by women, rather than wage increases, that led to higher earnings for the typical two-parent family.
Long-term earnings trends for women are difficult to establish, since of course until relatively recently, the majority of women did not work for pay. But Brookings finds that women's median earnings have stagnated since 2001. Men's earnings, too, are a more complicated story than is usually told. The median full-time man aged 25-64 earned about the same amount (adjusted for inflation) in 2009 as in 1969, which draws a picture of wage stagnation. That's bad enough, but Brookings finds that because of rising underemployment, unemployment, and incarceration among men, if you look at all men aged 25-64, not just those who happen to be working full-time, their median earnings have shrunk by 28% since 1969.
So women's work, leading to increased total work hours for families, has helped disguise the effects of wage stagnation and decreases. The responsible thing to do would be pick apart these effects, as Brookings is doing, to get a better picture of the working economy. The Republican thing, of course, would be to point out how much more money families could be taking in if only onerous child labor laws were relaxed.