THE allure of the trophy wife may be fading. Academics say they have found the first evidence that successful British males increasingly prefer a spouse with a high-powered job to one who stays at home with the children.

They reached their conclusion after comparing men’s incomes with the number of hours women worked. In the 1980s, the higher a man’s salary, the lower the average number of hours worked by his wife.

Now the situation has reversed. A professional man’s salary is 5.5% higher for every 1,000 hours a year worked by his wife, according to the study.

Experts welcomed the findings as evidence that male acceptance of female success is becoming widespread. But others said the burgeoning numbers of “power couples” may represent a new elite opening up a gap with the rest of the population.

“This is the first strong evidence of a turnaround in the link between wives’ hours and husbands’ earnings for any country,” said Paul Carlin, the economics professor who led the study, to be published in the journal Labour Economics. “But there is one potential downside. It could contribute to the widening income distribution gap in Britain because you are doubling up on the earning power.”

The findings suggest couples such as Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones or the Labour husband-and-wife ministers Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, in which the wife has a successful career in her own right, are now typical of professional classes.

The stay-at-home wife may become an endangered species, although a court case last year showed she can still fight back.

Melissa Miller won £5m from her former husband Alan, a top fund manager, in the Lords hearing. His barrister contrasted the “wife who works hard looking after the children” with Melissa, the “Harvey Nichols wife”, at which point Lady Justice Hale cut in and asked: “Which does the husband more value, the trophy wife or the workaday wife? The trophy wife, of course.”

The new findings were backed by David Rosenblatt, 44, from Liverpool, head of Genie-Tech International, a beauty treatment maker. He said being able to discuss business was an important part of his marriage to Carole, also 44, who runs the city’s OC Spa. “If you want to be successful nowadays, it is important to be in a working partnership,” said Rosenblatt.

Dan Church, 32, from Surrey, co-founder of the City headhunt-ers Hydrogen Group, said his wife Olivia Stockdale’s “drive and ambition” were what attracted him. Stockdale runs Iberian International, a property consultancy. “Some men might find it a threat, but men in general don’t expect women to give up careers any more,” said Church.

Carlin, an economics professor at Purdue University in Indi-ana, carried out his research using national data on age, earnings, education, type of job and other factors to analyse how “matching” of couples had changed over two decades.

For the early 1980s, Carlin and two academics from Swan-sea University found evidence of “assortative mating” — men marrying women with similar features such as height, education and sense of humour.

Earnings were the one area where this consistently failed to hold true. The factors blamed include the need to take time off for childbearing, discrimination at work and the convention in which a successful man’s wife often gave up her career to “sup-port” her husband. This “wage penalty” is what has changed.

The pay gap between the sexes fell from 45% in 1970 to 25% in 2002. Employment rate for married mothers was about 50% in the early 1980s but is now nearer 70%.

Anastasia de Waal, of the think tank Civitas, said Carlin’s findings were encouraging, but warned: “Concentration of high power and long hours within the same couples will concern those worried about parenting time or widening income inequality.”

Additional reporting: Roger Waite

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