Women Bringing Home The Bacon

But Wage Parity Is Still A Long Way Off

(CBS)  For many people the expectation remains to this day that it's the man of the house who brings home the big salary.

Well, don't be so sure, reports CBS News Correspondent John Roberts. A growing number of working mothers have salaries bigger than their husbands'.

Like most working moms, Susan Goldmark struggles to make time -- both for the work she loves and the family she loves even more, husband Kai and son Joshua.

"I regret not spending more time with my son," she says. "I regret that Kai gets to go to the soccer practice because I can't leave work at 3:30."

As a project manager for the World Bank, a typical workday for Goldmark is twelve hours long. With a six-figure salary, she's the breadwinner in the family, and has been for nearly all of their 25-year marriage.

"When I grew up in the 1950s and early 60s, that was the expected way, that men would earn more than women," she recalls. "Those were my expectations and deep down that was kind of what I wanted: to be taken care of financially."

Yet Goldmark's husband is a stay-at-home dad. He spends his days doing chores and working on his fourth book.

"I count myself lucky," he says. "I can sit at home and do what I like to do, which is write biography -- and that I'm married to a highly educated, smart and beautiful woman who earns a lot more money than I do."

According to the Census Bureau, there are two million stay-at-home dads in America. And fully one third of working mothers -- ten million -- earn more than their spouses.

Bernadette Grey, the editor-in-chief of Working Woman, offers an explanation: "What we're really seeing is the first generation of women who moved through corporations, women who have been diligent and have worked so hard in order to break barriers for all the women who have come up behind them."

Nationwide, there are nine million businesses owned by women. It is the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. economy, generating more than $3.6 trillion in sales.

The top 500 women business owners in America were honored at a gala dinner in Washington last week. Their companies generated over $88 billion last year.

"Women are starting their own businesses because they believe in the American dream," says Bernadette Grey. "They want to make more money."

These changing gender roles have been hard for some men to accept -- and women know it. Fifty-three percent of women in a recent survey believed that earning more than their husbands created marital problems. "I've been married twice," says Barbara Corcoran, who runs a multi-million dollar real estate company in New York. "My first husband had a very hard time adjusting to the fact that I was the breadwinner."

Earlier in their relationship, Goldmark and her husband said that they had difficult time with their non-traditional roles. But now they believe they were ahead of the curve and both accept thir version of modern life.

"I think that I can understand better than most men the difficulties of raising a child and running a house and it's a lot of work," says Kai Bird.

"I can relate to wanting to come home and have a beer and just veg out in front of the television and just not talk to anyone and not do anything," Goldmark says.

Despite these changes, true wage parity is still a long way off. Thirty-seven years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women still earn, on average, only 73 cents of every dollar a man makes. Among minority women, the gulf is even wider.