Gender stereotypes conceal the real issues

Once upon a time I was reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to my son, who was very young then. When I turned to the last page I was stumped. I - the independent, self-sustaining female - was thrown by the illustration before me. Decades of subliminal subconscious conditioning had left a mark.
Of course mummy bear could fix the chair while daddy bear cooks dinner.
Gender issues are varied and so I'm going to focus on one: wives earning more than their husbands.
A study by Reach Advisors found that the average salary of a single, childless woman between the ages of 22 and 30 was higher than wages of men in the same group in most cities in the United States. So far, so successful.
But things usually change once the two become one and have a family, with more mothers taking significant time off work, working part-time or even quitting. We all know this.
Pew Research puts the numbers at 39 per cent, 42 per cent and 27 per cent respectively in the US.
Having said this, I have come across families who have moved to the UAE because the wife has a great job here, and I am friends with quite a few alpha females who have successfully combined their ambition and drive with children and happy marriages.
And there's usually a secret ingredient for this to be the case. They married a "beta". These women confide that their partner is not ambitious, and that's why it works.
I don't believe they mean that their partner has no ambition, but that his sense of fulfilment and success isn't a suited, corporate, conventional one - with family and quality of life being the focus. Good for them.
This can be a sensitive issue. And when it's brought up, public and private comments don't usually match up. Of course it's about teamwork, about a sense of pride and happiness for your partner's success. But based on comments written in response to articles about women earning more than men, it is a contentious issue, with many high-earning single females saying that it is too big a problem to overcome for many potential mates.
It seems that the more successful unions are those where partners met when they were much younger, and grew into their respective jobs and careers where success is not a personal threat.
But this is not the case for many others if we're to go by findings that support the theory of "the caveman within". Let me explain: research by the University of Florida and Virginia discovered that the man's sense of self-esteem drops when their partner does well.
Females were not affected by how well or badly their partners did. Extrapolating and grossly generalising, this means that the more successful a female is, the lower her partner's self-esteem, and we can all guess where this can lead to.
Another bit of research from Cornell backs up assumptions telling us that men who are financially dependent on their partner, are five times more likely to cheat than men who contributed equally to the finances. In other words, the more successful a woman is, the more threatened her partner feels.
Again, this is generalising, but gender stereotyping is very much alive and kicking.
Just this week it made headlines once again with the furore over the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt's quip regarding "the trouble with girls". He has paid a heavy price for remarks he says were tongue-in-cheek and meant to be taken in jest.
He was forced to resign from his post at the University College London in response to the social media outrage over his choice of words.
It could be said that, instead of lampooning Tim Hunt, we should uphold the freedom of speech, and of telling bad jokes, and look to what's said as a barometer of a giant social issue.
Curtailing free speech or opinion only serves to bury these major issues deeper in the sand. And if that happens, we won't be living happily ever after.
Nima Abu Wardeh is the founder of the personal finance website cashy.me. You can reach her at nima@cashy.me.
Follow us on Twitter @TheNationalPF