When asked whether marriage could be potentially problematic for their careers, a third of women replied: Well, yes.
For Forbes, psychologist Dr. Janice Gassam Asare asked unmarried women whether they were worried that getting married to a man might hurt their work. Of the 200-some-odd respondents, 33% said they were, indeed, significantly to somewhat concerned about it.
And those concerns aren’t wholly unfounded. Roughly 455,000 women exited the workforce between January and August 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When nonprofit firm Catalyst asked over 1,000 women why they left those jobs, 42% of them cited home-based responsibilities like caregiving as the main reason.
Asare additionally pointed to a 2025 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which showed that “women in heterosexual couples who are the breadwinners in their households still do more housework … compared to men.”
She added: “What was particularly fascinating about this study was that the same results did not hold true for same-sex couples, demonstrating how deeply rooted gender norms are in our modern conceptions of heterosexual partnership.”
Pew Research Center confirmed this in its own survey, which showed that women spend significantly larger amounts of time tending to various household tasks than men – as much as an hour more per day, when averaged out.
Conservative groups have been wringing their hands over declining marriage rates, even going so far as to call the trend a crisis. But observations like Asare’s reveal that marriage can come with tangible drawbacks for women – and future generations of them are increasingly moving away from visions of a nuclear family as an aspiration.
“In many societies, women are expected to aspire to marriage and motherhood,” Asare wrote. “It’s important that women understand the myriad ways that marriage can impact them, their lives, their health and their careers before making the critical and life-altering decision to enter this type of partnership.”
