A MAN who earns less than his female partner is more likely to cheat on her, a study published yesterday in the United States found.

Cheating may be a man’s way of trying to restore his gender identity when he feels it is under threat, Ms Christin Munsch, a sociology doctorate candidate at Cornell University, said in the study, which she authored and presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“Making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners,” she said.

“This relationship may be particularly strong for certain subgroups of the population that  highly value traditional masculinity, like Latino men,” she added.

Indeed, the study found that infidelity increased dramatically when the man earning less  than his female partner is Latino, probably because breadwinner status is “one of the  defining features of Hispanic masculinity”.

Then again, the same study found that men whose partners were more dependent on  them were also more likely to cheat, making it a lose-lose situation for women.

It’s different for girls, though. If a woman is the main breadwinner in the family, she’s  more likely to cheat – it would seem that relationships where women earn more than men really are doomed – and if she depends on her male partner for money, then she is less
likely to cheat.

Overall, women are half as likely to cheat as men, whatever the circumstances, the study found.

Ms Munsch analysed data on 1,024 men and 1,559 women who were married or living  with a partner for at least a year for the study, which also found that, for whatever  reason, men were around twice as likely as women to be unfaithful – 6.7 per cent of men  cheated in a six-year period versus 3.3 per cent of women.