If there is one thing on which many working mothers agree, it is that their partners do not pull their weight on the domestic front.

But research to be published this week reveals that men are being unfairly accused and working women are advancing the myth of the "useless man" so they can feel more feminine. "Working women who provide the majority of the household's income to the family continue to articulate themselves as the ones who 'see' household messes and needs as a way to retain claims to an element of a traditional feminine identity," said Dr Rebecca Meisenbach, whose research paper, The Female Breadwinner, will be published this week in the journal Sex Roles.

But Meisenbach said the trend of the female high achiever and the male slacker is a tall story that women tell each other to compensate for the fact that most career-orientated women feel an "overwhelming sense of guilt" over their role and less of a mother and a wife.

"These women are struggling with the intersections of their status as the breadwinner and other gendered societal expectations," she said. "By highlighting stories of how men have to be told or asked to do specific chores in the home, these female breadwinners are making sure they still fit gender boundaries of a wife as someone who manages the home and children.

"By directing the housework done by their husbands, they maintain a sense of control over the traditionally feminine sphere of the home," she added. "This path of expressing control of and responsibility for both home and paid work may be essential for working mothers to manage competing discourses of ideal worker and intensive mothering."

Meisenbach questioned 15 female breadwinners on how they felt about their positions in the private domestic sphere and the public work sphere. She said that her theory was strengthened by the fact that the only women who did not express a strong sense of responsibility for the home were those who did not have children under 18.

"Women seemed simultaneously to be expressing control and a lack of control over housework," she said. "Working mothers face a number of gendered identity tensions, such as the contrast between pressures to live up to 'intensive mothering' norms and 'ideal worker' norms simultaneously." Although female breadwinners are increasingly common in industrialised societies and challenge traditional western gender norms, little research has focused on them.

Maria Shriver, the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, has launched one of the few research papers into the issue. Last year she was in charge of the release of A Woman's Nation, which she described as the first national project to "paint the portrait of the modern American woman" since her uncle, John F. Kennedy, gave the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt the same task in the 1960s.

"For the first time in our nation's history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before," Shriver said, calling it a "seismic shift" in the economic and cultural landscape of America.

The only British report to look explicitly at the issue was published in 2007 by the Future Foundation. The report found only 14% of UK homes had a female breadwinner, but the same study predicted that this number would double by 2030. The issue, however, is one that society is struggling with. Although gender expectations for family roles are nothing like as rigid as they once were, an Ipsos MORI poll conducted for the Observer last year found that 30% of all people – and 32% of young people – agreed with the statement: "The role of women in society is to be good mothers and wives".

"Housework represents an interesting juxtaposition of control," said Meisenbach. "On one level, women described retaining control over housework – they talked about their partners contributing to domestic chores but almost always in response to being asked or told to do the task by the wife.

"They all gendered their partners' behaviour with comments like 'He's a man, they don't see that there is a mess'. And 'My husband's a guy. He picks and chooses what chores he does'. But by gendering his behaviour, they were also gendering their own as women and mothers, instead of breadwinners."

Despite the anxiety that female breadwinners described, Meisenbach also found that most actively relished the control and power that their position gave them at home. "I didn't find female breadwinners deferred their power to their husbands at all," she said. "Over 60% said they enjoyed the control they experienced, explicitly noting how they were happily different from the '1950s housewife' or even from female friends within the traditional gender norms.

• This article was amended on Wednesday 25 November 2009. Dr Rebecca Meisenbach questioned 15 female breadwinners on their positions in the private domestic sphere and the public work sphere, not 15,000 as we previously said. This has been corrected.