In analysing heterosexual couples’ work–family arrangements over time and space, the comparative social policy literature has settled on the framework of the ‘male-breadwinner’ versus the ‘dual-earner’ family. Yet, in assuming men in couple-families are (full-time) employed, this framework overlooks another work–family arrangement, which is the ‘female-breadwinner’ couple. Including female-breadwinner couples matters because of their growing prevalence and, as our analysis shows, greater economic vulnerability. We perform descriptive and regression analyses of Luxembourg Income Study microdata to compare household incomes for female-breadwinner couples and other couple-types across 20 industrialized countries. We then consider how labour earnings and benefit incomes vary for ‘pure’ breadwinner couples – comprising one wage-earner and one inactive/unemployed partner – according to the gender of the breadwinner. We find that pure female breadwinners have lower average individual earnings than male breadwinners, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and occupational and working-time differences. Furthermore, welfare systems across most countries are not working hard enough to compensate for the female breadwinner earnings penalty, including in social-democratic countries. Once controls are included in our regression models, it never happens that pure female breadwinners have higher disposable household incomes than pure male breadwinners. Thus, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that female-breadwinner families sit at the intersection of multiple disadvantages. In turn, these couples offer comparative scholars of the welfare state an ‘acid test’ case study for how effectively families are protected from social risk. Our results additionally highlight how cross-national differences in the female breadwinner income disadvantage do not fit neatly with established welfare typologies, suggesting that other factors – in particular, labour market characteristics and the economic cycle – are also at play.

在分析异性恋夫妇在时间和空间上的工作-家庭安排时，比较性社会政策文献以“男性养家糊口的人”与“双重收入者”家庭的框架为基础。但是，如果假设（全职）雇用夫妻家庭中的男性，则该框架忽略了另一项工作-家庭安排，即“女性养家糊口”夫妻。由于她们的患病率不断上升，而且如我们的分析所示，更大的经济脆弱性也使包括女read主夫妇成为重要问题。我们对卢森堡收入研究的微数据进行描述性分析和回归分析，以比较20个工业化国家中女性养家糊口的夫妇和其他夫妇的家庭收入。然后，我们根据养家糊口者的性别，考虑“纯净”养家糊口夫妇的劳动收入和福利收入如何变化，这对夫妇包括一名工薪族和一名闲置/失业伴侣。我们发现，即使在控制了社会人口统计学特征以及职业和工作时间的差异之后，纯女性养家糊口者的平均个人收入也比男性养育者低。此外，包括社会民主国家在内，大多数国家的福利制度都没有尽力弥补女性养家糊口的收入损失。一旦将控制包括在我们的回归模型中，纯女性养家糊口的家庭可支配收入就不会比纯男性养家糊口的家庭具有更高的可支配收入。从而，我们的研究增加了越来越多的证据表明，以女性为荣的家庭处于多种劣势的交汇处。反过来，这些夫妇为福利国家的比较学者提供了一个“酸性测试”案例研究，以了解如何有效地保护家庭免受社会风险。我们的研究结果还突出显示了女性养家糊口的收入劣势的跨国差异如何与既定的福利类型无法很好地契合，这表明其他因素，尤其是劳动力市场特征和经济周期也正在发挥作用。