Who wears the pants

To be fair, many of the scholarly studies' conclusions include a "final say" contingency -- many husbands claim that they have veto power when they feel very strongly about an issue. But consumer research shows that with the exception of what car to buy and when to buy it, men rarely claim strong enough feelings to override their wives.

"Across all decision-making realms, it tilts to the woman," noted Rich Morin, the Pew study's lead author. "I was surprised by the percentage of men who made none of the decisions in any of the areas. A significant percentage were just bystanders." Not surprisingly, one reason men say they are willing to acquiesce in their spouses' wishes is that their wives usually have greater knowledge of the day-to-day activities and needs of the home than they do. They trust their wives' choices the way they would any specialist's. But what is rather unexpected is the deeper (and much sweeter) reason men have for giving in to their wives: They want them to be happy, or at least they don't want to be responsible for making them unhappy.

The general consensus of sociologists is that, whereas a woman's marital satisfaction is dependent on a combination of economic, emotional and psychological realities, a man's marital satisfaction is most determined by one factor: how happy his wife is. When she is happy, he is. Working within this framework, most husbands are unwilling to dig in their heels on any issue unless they have a tremendous incentive to do so.

- Excerpted from Who Wears the Pants in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine)

I haven't documentation for this "general consensus of sociologists" (although I haven't exactly spent a lot of time looking either, and this is a newspaper article, not something in an academic journal).

Anyways, this either sounds like (a) some innate level of complementarianism, or (b) family law favoring the wife. I personally that it's suspect a bit of both. In other, related news, the LA Times reports that "marriages that did work well all had one thing in common -- the husband was willing to give in to the wife."