According to the study: The income of women drops by 20 percent in marriage

Love, security, a support in difficult times - yes, everyone can mean a marriage. But marriage also means something else: waiver. And especially for women in marriage. After the wedding, it statistically dispenses with a fifth of her income. This has now shown a new study by the IFO Institute and the University of Oslo.

The scientists have evaluated pension insurance data and found that the work income of women has reduced an average of 20 percent as soon as they were married. The main reason: women work less or give up their gainful employment completely.

Sure, women are after all in marriage that screw their wage work back to raise children - you might think now. In fact, the researchers have also observed this decline in salary in women without children: "Our investigations show that in a marriage the differences in income between men and women increase and that regardless of the birth of children," says IFO researcher Elena Herold. Less surprising: In men, the researchers could not observe any reduction in income after the marriage.

But why is it that a woman's salary shrinks as soon as she has a ring on her finger? According to the study, false incentives in our tax system are to blame. More precisely: the spouse splitting. Herold says: "A quarter of the reduction in income among wives can be attributed to spouse splitting." Briefly as a reminder: In the spouse splitting, the income of both spouses is added up and then halved. Tax must then be paid for this amount. So if you work little as a woman, you still have to pay the same high tax rate as the fully employed partner - and in the end there is hardly anything left.

"Then I let it be the same," think many married women think. But as soon as marriage is divorced, women are massively disadvantaged. Because of their low income, they could not build up any assets in all the years of marriage. They also did not pay into the pension fund. And because they have withdrawn from the world of work for too long, it will be difficult to find a good job now. Experts have long been calling for a long time to abolish the spouse splitting.

But that is not the only reason for the decline in salary in married women - also playing gender roles. For example, the researchers have determined that, for example, women who grew up in East Germany with more modern role models have a lower decline in income in marriage than women with traditional gender roles in West Germany. Traditionally, according to the study, the woman takes over more tasks in the household after the wedding, while the men's commitment hardly changes.

The study throws a fairly unromantic light on marriage because it shows that a wedding is an income trap for women in Germany. We can only escape this trap if we finally bring our tax system to the 2025, free ourselves from old gender roles and distribute them fairly.