Whether it’s a tiara or an engagement ring, women face the same conundrum. Who should support a family financially — the husband or the wife?

The U.K. will soon have an American princess, but that royal title comes at a price. Earlier this week, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced that they will get married in May. Before their engagement, Markle left her USA TV television show, “Suits,” and shut down her lifestyle site, The Tig, and is stepping away from her role as an ambassador with the United Nations and World Vision Canada. Senior royal wives almost always leave their chosen careers in favor of official royal duties. Sophie Rhys-Jones married Prince Edward in 1999, but left her PR firm in 2001 after critics alleged she was using her royal connections to get clients.

“ ‘There are deep-rooted attitudes that a woman should be the primary care giver, so it is ‘understood’ that her career may have to take a back seat for a while as similar male colleagues move ahead at a more rapid pace.’ ”

American women are under similar pressure, but for different reasons. More young men than women have consistently held less egalitarian and more traditional views on working mothers, according to a recent paper, “Trending Towards Traditionalism,” by sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter. Over the last several decades, “the relative difference between them has not narrowed,” they found. There’s also been a decline in the number of young men and women supporting working mothers over the last 20 years. The percentage of high-school seniors holding more traditional views on working mothers fell to 42% in 2014 from 58% in 1994.

In 2017, it’s too expensive for most Americans to hire a live-in nanny like Alice in “The Brady Bunch” or a staff as seen in “Downton Abbey,” says Peter Schiff, chief executive of Euro Pacific Capital, and a market pundit who often espouses what critics describe as a bearish outlook for the equity market. One reason: It often doesn’t make financial sense for parents to both work and put their kids in child care, he says, adding that his own wife does not work full-time outside the home. “All the prewar buildings in New York City had maid’s quarters,” Schiff adds. “Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper.”

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Source: sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter

Research shows that women are likely to give up their careers when they marry. Some 77% of Harvard Business School graduates — 73% of men and 85% of women — believe that “prioritizing family over work” is the No. 1 barrier to women’s career advancement, according to a 2014 survey of 25,000 graduates. One female graduate cited “deep-rooted attitudes that a woman should be the primary care giver, so it is ‘understood’ that her career may have to take a back seat for a while as similar male colleagues move ahead at a more rapid pace.”

“ ‘Oh, how fragile is the ego of a man. We must never let him feel like a bonsai in a grove of California redwoods — no, he must always see himself as a towering tree, magnificent in comparison with his female partner.’ ” — Julia Baird in Glamour Magazine

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Other studies suggest an even higher number of Americans favor male breadwinners. More than 70% of Americans say it is very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner, but less than one-third say the same for a woman, according to a recent survey of nearly 5,000 adults by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. This comes as women in the U.S. have increased their labor force participation and earning power. In 1980, only 13% of married women earned more than or as much as their husbands versus 25% in 2000.

Source: sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter

Another similarity with the soon-to-be royal couple: The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to get married, a separate analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by Pew concluded. In 2015, among adults ages 25 and older, 65% with a four-year college degree were married, compared with 55% of those with some college education and 50% among those with no education beyond high school. Twenty-five years earlier, the marriage rate was above 60% for al these groups. Never-married adults who have not completed college are more likely than college graduates to say they don’t plan on marrying.

“ Other gender roles have changed over the last 50 years. Fathers are more involved in their children’s lives. In 2015, they reported spending seven hours a week on child care — almost triple the time they provided back in 1965. ”

Some men regard it as a structural problem rather than a gender-based one. “American families are smaller for a reason,” Schiff says. “They can’t afford to raise children or send them to college. It’s too expensive. People are getting married later in life or they can’t get married at all. We’ve lost the free market principles that gave us the free market in the first place. We have lots of regulation, higher taxes, much bigger government and a much smaller middle class. It has made the economy less efficient and less dynamic.”

Source: sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter

Writer Julia Baird has another theory: Men’s egos may not fare so well when if they don’t earn as much as their wives. “Oh, how fragile is the ego of a man. We must never let him feel like a bonsai in a grove of California redwoods — no, he must always see himself as a towering tree, magnificent in comparison with his female partner,” she wrote in Glamour Magazine. The risk of divorce was 32% higher when a husband isn’t working full-time, according to a study of more than 6,300 couples by Alexandra Killewald, professor of sociology at Harvard University, published last year in the “American Sociological Review.”

The good news: Gender roles have managed to evolve over the last 50 years and fathers are more involved in their children’s lives. In 2015, they reported spending, on average, seven hours a week on child care — almost triple the time they provided back in 1965, previous research by Pew found. What’s more, fathers put in about nine hours a week on household chores in 2015, up from four hours in 1965. Mothers still spend more time with their children — about 15 hours a week on child care and 18 hours a week on housework in 2015.

Meghan Markle, meanwhile, left the following message on her now-defunct lifestyle site: “Above all, don’t forget your worth — as I’ve told you time and again: you, my sweet friend, you are enough.”