Nivea, an international cosmetics company, recently conducted a survey that reveals two thirds of middle-aged British women provide the majority of their family’s income, and almost three in 10 are their families’ sole income providers.

Other studies show that one third of married women in America make more money than their husbands; this figure is expected to rise past 50 percent by 2025.

These figures represent an enormous departure from the traditional division of responsibilities within the family, whereby men provide and women care for the children and the home.

“Up until recently, most husbands made more money than their wives, who typically had more responsibilities caring for the home and children. That’s no longer the case,” reports Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist with New York Presbyterian Hospital. “With more women going to college—and graduate school—they’re also landing higher paying jobs. As a result, women aren’t as concerned about having their spouses support them and are more interested in being successful in the world. Sometimes this means that the wife brings home more than her husband.”

What are the fruits of this change? For decades, the traditional pattern has been under attack for being unfair to women and even to men, and spoken of almost as if it were the only thing standing in the way of successful families, fulfilled parents and self-actualized children. Feminism and political correctness have dictated that women pursue their own careers outside the home—and that men not stand in their way. Now, in large numbers, women are proving themselves more than capable of fulfilling the provider responsibility they were long denied.

Now that those traditional roles have largely been abandoned, are we better off? The Nivea study doesn’t even begin to ask that question. But its findings do provide clues as to some answers.

According to Nivea, many of these female breadwinners are frustrated. They say they are not getting enough help from their husbands. The survey shows that 70 percent of those women polled said they wished their husbands would help out with domestic chores more.

This should come as no surprise. As every family knows, there is much work to be done to keep a household functioning smoothly beyond simply injecting money into it. An annual survey of stay-at-home moms shows that they work an average of 92 hours a week wearing 10 different hats: housekeeper, day-care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, ceo and psychologist. It’s little wonder that when a woman adds a full-time job outside the home to that list, she feels frustrated when she doesn’t get enough help from her spouse.

“[S]ome women feel resentful if they not only shoulder most of the household’s financial obligations, but also are expected to pick up the lion’s share of the domestic responsibilities,” Saltz said. “[D]eep down a lot of men and women still feel uncomfortable with this ‘role reversal.’”

But the more important point is, when Mom spends 40-plus hours a week away from home, many of those responsibilities simply don’t get done. As nice as that second salary might be, a family’s quality of life inevitably suffers when the stay-at-home parent role gets relegated to after hours.

The enormous assumption behind the drive to move women out of the home and into the work force was that no harm would follow when those jobs at home were subcontracted to the day-care center and the local pizza delivery joint.

The abandonment of traditional family roles leaves a lot up in the air for young men and women striking out in life. “It’s a growing concern for people in their 20s and 30s,” writes Wall Street Journal journalist Sue Shellenbarger, “not just because young women are earning more, but because young men feel less compelled to fit the mold of the traditional solo breadwinner.” She reports that these young men expect a woman to help with providing, and are thus hunting for career-minded partners. “Many women are surprised to find their earning power has become a magnet for the opposite sex,” Shellenbarger says.

By no means are all women looking on this as a victory for women’s rights. In fact, some balk at the pressure of having to provide for a family. “Some women are wary of being trapped in the breadwinner role themselves,” Shellenbarger continues. “Some want the companionship of men who are as ambitious as they are. Others want the freedom to stay home with their children some day.”

Dr. Saltz makes the additional point that “Some men feel emasculated if their wives are the primary breadwinners and they are asked to take on more household chores and additional childcare responsibilities.” She dismisses this feeling as being illogical and irrational—mere residue of having grown up in a family following the traditional pattern, something a man can root out through ample communication with his breadwinning spouse.

That seems to be the moral of the story for most people evaluating the results of these studies: If you have a problem with wives and mothers assuming the breadwinner role, you’re just not enlightened enough.

The emerging terminology in this trend is the “alpha female” and the “beta male”—the former being a happy, highly paid working woman and the latter being a man who’s “self-confident” enough to be perfectly fine with depending on his alpha female. The conventional wisdom is, a man can rid himself of lingering discomfort over his wife supporting him by coming to understand his own intrinsic worth. Then he too can experience the joys of being a sophisticated beta male.

Even the Nivea survey results, however, tend to undermine this interpretation. According to the survey, for many women, the self-fulfillment supposedly awaiting them in the career world turned out to be less satisfying than they expected, and many of them would rather just go home. Nivea found that 40 percent of women thought of their career as all-important when they first started, but only 15 percent feel the same way upon reaching middle age.

These are the types of statistics that are routinely ignored by those who insist that career must come first for a woman—simply because they embarrassingly contradict the gender-free fantasy world of political correctness. Some even attribute this desire for domesticity to the fact that women just aren’t treated fairly in the work place.

But there is a sad reality within these numbers. In college, many women are sold the lie that they can have their career and save having a family until middle age. In truth, however, infertility increases dramatically as women age, and many childless middle-aged career women are devastated to learn that their child-bearing years are past.

“At mid-life, between a third and half of all high-achieving women in America do not have children,” wrote Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. “The vast majority of these women did not choose to be childless. Looking back to their early 20s, when they graduated college, only 14 percent said they definitely had not wanted children. … When I talked to these women about children, their sense of loss was palpable. I could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and sense it in their words.”

For those willing to recognize reality, the frustrations and problems associated with this trend are simply the bitter fruits of following the modern mandates of political correctness, most particularly the pressure on women to prioritize personal career success over the success of their families. Concurrent with the abandonment of traditional division of responsibilities, the exorbitant costs associated with the high standard of living many families demand cause couples to feel they have no choice but to have both parents work outside the home. Reducing expenses to match a single income apparently isn’t an option.

Studies have consistently affirmed that young people thrive under the focused care of a stay-at-home mother, and that the widespread sacrificing of family for career is having a detrimental—even devastating—effect on our children.

The good news is that every family with an intact marriage has the power of choice, and every couple can reverse the trend within their own home. For more understanding about God’s awesome roles for men and women, read “Wanted: Real Men” and “The Beautiful Role of a Mother.”