Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity

by Claudia Goldin

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics

A renowned economic historian traces women’s journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Feminism, History, Politics, Gender, Womens

344 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2021

Reviews

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing synthesis and extension of a career’s work on disparities in women’s experience in the workforce, how it has changed over time, and could change in the future. I was familiar with much of the argument from a number of Claudia Goldin’s papers and talks but really enjoyed seeing all of it tied together and framed so nicely around a set of women over the last century and they way they handled their constraints and tradeoffs around work and family. The book is very accessible to a general reader, it has a number of clear data plots but nothing remotely technical (in fact personally I would have liked a little more technical material, but I understand why it was omitted and know where to find it).

The most important argument in Goldin’s book is “true pay and employment discrimination, while they matter, are relatively small.” Instead the biggest obstacle to college educated women earning higher wages is institutional: the way that work is organized to reward “greedy jobs” that demand lots of your time at unpredictable hours (e.g., the investment banker that has to be available for a deal at any hour because the clients want them and they are not interchangeable with others). Her research has shown that women and men generally earn similar amounts initially but diverge dramatically after the birth of a child when women tend to drop out, shift to part time, or even just take jobs with more predictable hours—that generally come with lower pay per hour and less prospect for advancement. While Goldin is supportive of paid leave and other policy changes in her analysis it does not rectify this problem, what does is changing the way jobs are organized. Some of Goldin’s examples are veterinarians, pharmacists and doctors all of which shifted from always on jobs dominated by men to more scheduled and predictable jobs that are majority women.

“In a world of greedy jobs couple equity is expensive” Goldin writes, noting that many couples with children end up specializing with one having a higher-paid “greedy job” while the other is more available at anytime for children (who, although she does not use the word, can be quite greedy too with their need for unpredictable and unscheduleable attention).

The above paragraphs are about the present. But as an economic historian and labor economist, Goldin grounds all of it in a century’s history of women in the workplace and family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Goldin’s analysis/narrative is how nonlinear the changes of women and work have been. I’m accustomed to looking at graphs of the steady increase in female labor force participation through 2000 (when it stalled out) and thinking of it as a monotonic progression. But Goldin looks much more carefully at the economic behavior by cohort (so not just everyone in 1960 but distinguishing 30 year olds born in 1930 from 60 year olds born in 1900) and organizes her story around five “groups”. She also looks at a wide range of data, including age at first marriage, age at first child, and whether ever had child by middle age.

Normally I’m skeptical of analysis that groups generations and implies discontinuous changes but Goldin’s data bears it out. Moreover, a lot of it is shaped by some actual discontinuities in circumstances: the Depression (which made it hard to get jobs, putting pressure on women not to work), World War II (the opposite), the Pill (at first largely available to married women but then for younger unmarried women). These groups are: (1 born 1878-1897) career or family; (2 born 1898-1923) job then family; (3 born 1924-43) family then job; (4 born 1944-57) family then career; and (5 born 1958-78) career and family. Thinking about these groups helped me to better understand women in my own life, like my mother, and contextualize them in their generations.

Some of the striking nonlinearities on the family side (all of these for college-graduate women):

—For the generation born from 1878-97 32% were never married by age 50. For the most recent generation that has fallen to 12%.

—For ever married women in the first generation only 30 percent were working at age 45-49 but it was up to 84 percent in the latest generation. Thus the shift from “career or family” to “career and family”.

—In the middle generation (born 1924-43) women had children very young: nearly 60 percent of women age 25-29 had a child as compared to about 25 percent now. But, technology has extended the ability to have children so looking at an older age the percentage with children is as high/higher than ever.

—Jobs have always been “greedy” (in the sense of rewarding people willing to be available anytime) but as inequality has increased the consequences of the gender disparities associated with greedy jobs have grown.

—The Pill, which enabled a generation of women to delay marriage and childbearing, opening up professional schools and career advancement.

—The increased availability of no fault divorce led women to invest more in themselves in ways that would outlast their marriage, including in terms of education and career.

Goldin’s history documents regulations and discrimination that prevented women from working in certain careers or barred married women from working, as well as documenting the way those rules evolved and were generally dropped over time.

Goldin’s solution is “we must change how work is structured. We have to make flexible positions more abundant and more productive.” A quibble with the almost uniformly excellent book is that she doesn’t exactly spell out the obstacles to this aspiration, specify exactly who the “we” is, or what exactly could bring this about. In many professions, as she notes, there is a high value to the same person having a wide scope of knowledge and engagement or being face-to-face with clients. It may be possible to make some changes (and she talks about some of the changes being made in, for example, finance) but they may be limited. Are companies leaving dollar bills on the table by overpaying for unpleasant hours and not having access to as many talented women? Are there limits to their change? Is there any role for public policy? How much would childcare help?

Overall, I loved the book and felt myself wanting even more.

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting take on how the workplace can't or doesn't compensate women equally regardless of policies or regulations. No handwringing or anger, just clear-eyed economic review and data to show changes over time. She draws a very interesting arc of women's progress economically, dividing stages of 5 groupings related to career, education, marriage and (bearing or adopting ) children from about 1890 forward.

Female Nobel laureate in Economics, a field where women are much less lauded than men.

[Carolyn Kost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marissa Mayer birthed twins during her tenure as CEO of Yahoo! and famously said that a woman steps back temporarily but later "her career takes off" (234). No, the research indicates, it most certainly does not; in reality, it never recovers.

The thesis here is important: the gender pay gap results from women's actions (career interruptions and average weekly hours), rather than systemic sexism. Women prefer positions with predictable schedules and flexible hours, which offer less pay and they tend to remove themselves from the labor force to care for children, which disadvantages their careers in various ways, especially in jobs where personal relationship is important, like law and finance.

Hence, the usual suggestions for redress "ridding the labor market of biased managers and organization, encouraging women to compete more, teaching them to bargain more effectively, and revealing to all what others learn...But those, and even the more challenging fix of eliminating all occupational segregation, would have only a modest impact." The gap was less "for those who did not take a break of more than six months" (175).

If Harvard economist Goldin had stuck to that thesis, which she repeats over and over again, we would have before us an article rather than a book. Unfortunately, she ventures into territory that relies on presumptions that are incomplete at best and misguided at worst

Here's the rub: "Women who never had a child (and never took a leave of more than six months) are almost at parity relative to men, although they still earn less [9 cents lower on the dollar], whereas those who have had a child keep on doing worse" (163). Even here, "there is compelling evidence...that choice, rather than paternalism or bias, is the major factor" (166). Women with top-earning husbands and children are those with the largest reduction in hours of work and employment.

Surprisingly, this holds true even in Nordic countries with the "most generous family-centered policies in the world, including subsidized childcare and extensive paid leave for both parents" (167). In order to maximize earnings potential as a couple with children, one drops back, and it is usually the female. But what happens when it's the male; does it hold true? That's crucial and Goldin doesn't tell us. Insufficient data?

In the first seven chapters, Goldin looks at five distinct chronological cohorts, which share "constraints....and aspirations" and "differ by their combinations of career, job, marriage and family" (23). In Group One (born 1878-1897), women tended to remain single in order to maintain their independence, hence the low rates of marriage and childbearing. However, with Group 5 (born 1958-1978), "the gap widens with age...[and] grows at various moments in life, such as having a child or making a geographic move. The gender earnings gap is, therefore, a series of numbers, and thinking of it as a series over an individual's life cycle can reveal more of the reasons for its existence than the conveniently cited single number" (162).

The "largest gaps...are found in professional occupations with considerable self-ownership, such as law firms, as well as those dealing with finance, sales, administration, management, and business operations," (77 cents on the male dollar), while the "lowest gaps are in math and computer science, health care (excluding physicians), science, and engineering, (94 cents on the male dollar)" (170). In "up-or-out" jobs, like academia or consulting, women "must begin their families before their careers are solidified" (199).

While by no means does it necessarily follow that childfree academics have blind spots when analyzing women's decisions regarding career and bearing and raising children, Goldin does. The feminist lens can too easily mask empirical fact; the struggle is to maintain objectivity. The sexes are different. Why is that hard to affirm? Why is that even politically incorrect?

Goldin is all about couple equity. Her astonishing assumption is that, if it were possible, women and men would prefer to have careers and raise children equitably, since both parents would want to spend more time at home if they could. "46% of all fathers would like to spend more time with their children." This is so off-base it's laughable. Not even close. Women and men have different values. 29% of college-educated men and nearly twice as many, 56% of college-educated women value flexibility in their work schedules.

A 2019 Gallup poll found that 56% of U.S. women and 75% of men "would prefer to work outside the home rather than stay home and take care of the house and family." Study after study has indicated the same, including the 1997 bestselling book Time Bind, in which sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that home life had become so stressful for many Americans that "the workplace was now a refuge from home rather than the other way around." A majority of both sexes prefer the challenges of work to the challenges of the family; work is their refuge. A few other articles indicate that women registered more positive mood outside of the home, even if that were at work.

Goldin's astonishingly unconvincing solutions are saved for the end, like changing the structure of work. She thinks pharmacists are a model because the substitution among the pool "is the key to reducing disproportionately high hourly pay for long and on-call hours." That already happens: the male or the childfree person in the office gets saddled with picking up the slack, and often is not compensated for that, just as she recommends. Next, she wants "the greedy [time-intensive] job" to "not pay as much for on-call, weekend, long-hours work," so it will be less enticing. Professional people are taking on side gigs and extra jobs to increase their income and Goldin thinks they will forego an opportunity for extra money at their primary job? Nope. My dad worked overtime every chance he got.

"Better yet, make the flexible job more productive and have it pay more. That would go a long way toward couple equity because the male parent will gladly switch to the flexible job and the female parent "would earn more in the flexible position and be less likely to leave her job entirely. The family will be slightly poorer in terms of their income, but they will be monumentally richer in terms of couple equity" (219). Finally, decrease the cost of childcare (many of the childfree like me don't want to subsidize that, actually; they're your kids, you pay for them or don't have them) and "alter social norms so that tradeoffs do not depend on gender;" but, as she indicates, "that might serve to greater equalize economic outcomes by gender but would not fix the problem of couple equity."

The final chapter contains various observations about the impact of COVID on gender and career, and this: "For women to achieve career, family, and equity, fathers will have to make the same demands at work that women make, and they will have to take charge at home so women can take charge at work....We need men to lean out at work, support their male colleagues who are on parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways by letting them know that their families are worth even more than their jobs" (235). Goldin, they do not want to. We want different things. Women and men have been tested left, right, and center, six ways north of Sunday to value relationships more than men. Stop denying this and making women into men; that is really what she means by equity.

_______________ Part 2 : On wives of top earners ______________

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman needs to expend a greater moral effort than the male to resist temptations of dependence. This is a truism, simply put. Evidently, Goldin does not know this, doesn't believe this, doesn't grasp this, or discards this entirely, but it's true. She does mention that women married to top earners are "three times more likely to be out of the labor force than others." She intimates that among the various cohorts of women who leave the labor force despite having advanced degrees must have intended to use those degrees. These are the women I have most contact with and hence, who most interest me. Several sociological studies have been published focused on ultra high net worth women. Does Goldin not leave Harvard's ivory tower to actually get to know women in the area around Cambridge? Do wealthy women really want to have a career? Goldin seems to believe they do. That's a central question Goldin raised for me with this book and she answered it poorly.

Anecdotally, many of the women I know in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida, who have wealthy husbands and leave their careers also have professional degrees like J.D., M.D. and Ph.D. Many, many women I've spoken with in passing and others I've known well have left tenured professorships, C-suite jobs, etc. because they just didn't find them fulfilling, with or without children. Some hated the office politics. Some realized they wanted to be present for their kids' games and plays, etc. Goldin even confesses it is a mere presumption on her part that these women had fully intended to have professions, but leave only or primarily due to the aspects of the childcare calculus related to economics and time. This is off base, has no empirical support, and is refuted roundly by these women who surround me. For decades, I have had the opportunity to observe such women in their natural habitat. I identify three categories with some overlap: the Ladies who Lunch and Leisure, the do-nothings, and the professional volunteers.

In the first category, true to popular portrayal, are those who play golf, pickleball or tennis (some really do have affairs with their tennis coaches) and ride their horses. Some maintain their figures and faces with constant fillers and lifts, personal trainer, nutritionist, Pilates, spin classes, etc. Lunch takes hours including hair and makeup, travel, drinks and conversation. Planning dinner parties can take weeks, even months, what with the décor and flowers, caterers, entertainment, guest list, attire, etc. They redecorate their various homes endlessly. Aside from all this and their psychotherapist, their attention is fully focused on the husband and children if they have them.

Do you wonder what the life of a do-nothing looks like? This from Brooke Kroeger rings true:
“Thursday. My son missed the bus so I had to take him to school. I wanted to get my hair washed and take a shower, but no, I had to throw on a pullover without even washing my face, and with the traffic I wasn’t back to 54th St, until 9:30 A.M. So forget the shopping I had planned to do. I took care of the house. There was an appointment at school at noon, and after shopping for the groceries, it was 3 P.M. and the day was gone and what had I done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Of course, this leaves me furious. So my husband comes home and can’t understand why I am in such a state. “What do you have to be upset about and unhappy about?’ he says. ‘You do nothing all day long.’
...What there is to do expands to fill the amount of time there is to do it....For most, there is no leaving the house before 10 A.M., and errands that could be handled by phone easily burgeon into daylong chores. There is also a tendency not to schedule more than one major event per day."

Wives have to be free to deal with anything that comes up. If hubby has to travel somewhere and wants her companionship or has time to go on vacation, the wife has to be able to travel with him.
One of my friends said, "I didn't love being a corporate wife. It was soul sucking. I was literally treated like a very well dressed domestic. No one loves that. You can't convince me that they do."

The professional volunteers can swoop in and out as their schedule demands, but they contribute to their communities in genuinely significant ways through serving organizations, [breaking into some of which requires some seriously sharp elbows], or on boards, planning and organizing gala events, engaging in philanthropic activity, and, possibly, forging a social network that buttresses the couple's social status. One friend put it this way, "Think on this for a second. Most volunteer positions are held by WOMEN. WOMEN telling other WOMEN that they are worthy and doing great things. WOMEN working together toward a common goal. There is no patriarchy here. I LOVED my time with Junior League and [organization to end local poverty]. I learned more about dealing with organizations and people doing volunteer work than any time I spent in corporate situations. Are there awful women volunteering? Of course there are but that's true of all scenarios."

It has become abundantly clear to me that men like to have their wife's attention and quite often enjoy being the provider as much as women enjoys being a trophy and cheerleader and having the freedom to do whatever the spirit moves her to do. Even if they don't have children, she has to be available to travel when the husband can and it doesn't always make financial sense for her to work because it can raise their tax bracket. Co-workers and demands in the workplace were often too stressful to be worth continuing.

If they do have school aged children, the mother's self-worth can be dependent on how successful her children are in the meritocracy. Goldin does not understand how much is involved. When very young, there are nannies and pre-school (over $50K in several schools in my community), but with school, the children are entirely centered in the mother's attention and are the secondary focus for the father. It's a wonder more don't send their children to boarding school, for life becomes an endless and utterly exhausting cycle of athletics (with the expectation they will stay and watch), music lessons, test prep, tutoring, meal preparation or, more commonly Door Dash/Uber Eats/some analog thereof.

I used to teach Women's Studies. I am fascinated by and keep up with the research in my field. Goldin is an economist. We have different lenses, even though we both use statistical databases, but I have a habit of asking women about their lives.
They tell me that they found their careers far more fulfilling than motherhood.
They tell me that motherhood surprised them by being far more fulfilling than their career.
They tell me that they wish they hadn't had children or adopted.
They tell me that having children or adopting gave their lives meaning.
They tell me they had always wanted to have children.
They tell me they didn't intend to have children. [The current statistics indicate that approximately 45% of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned, and the anecdotal evidence certainly bears that out.]
Young women tell me they want to have children while they are young enough to enjoy them.
Young women tell me they want children only once their career is established, maybe without a partner, ignoring the staggering statistics about the non-viability of freezing eggs for later use in IVF, as well as the costs.
Some women tell me they are working in this country while their parents care for their kids abroad, usually in Latin America or the Philippines.
Some women have professions and others do not, but many from both groups grapple with childcare.
It is evident that some children are better off cared for by day, evening and/or weekend nannies and boarding schools. Some mothers don't know which room in their cavernous home is their child's (yes, true story).
Some tell me their greatest regret is hiring a nanny when their children were young.
With those hundreds of stories in mind, I kept recalling Simpson's paradox, which reveals the limitations of statistics all the way through this book.

I am grateful for Goldin's valuable thesis, but when she ventures into ultracrepidarian territory, it's a frustrating enterprise because she truly believes men and women want the same things and we just do not.

Besides which, to quote James Brown, Baby, it's a man's world.

[Paulatics · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book could have been much shorter if the author had just written these three words: Biology is destiny.

As a social scientist with a multidisciplinary focus on sociology, political science, and history, reading this book brought out my impatience with the obvious limitations of single disciplinary study. It is astonishing that a Harvard economist writes a book with great fanfare that concludes the reason why women make less money than men is all due to TIME. Not sexism, racism, historically discriminatory laws, biological determinism, the lack of an Equal Rights Amendment, or any other social reality. Just time.

The lack of accessible and affordable child care in America is not even mentioned until the Epilogue. And, it is without the explanation that psychologists were paid by the government during WWII to convince women (and men) that infants and children would thrive without their mothers during the work day because they were needed for the war effort. And, as soon as the War was over and men came back for their jobs, women were told by the same professionals that their children needed them at home.

The deficiencies of economics as a stand-alone field of study, without the context of sociology seem quite clear. This book contributes nothing after all to the literature and body of knowledge about pay inequity. Just ask any working woman.

[Inês · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recomendação do ano, para todos os que querem saber mais sobre a evolução da vida da mulher, ao longo dos últimos 100 anos.

“The fact that I witnessed Margaret Gilpin Reid trudging to the com. puter center means that we occupied the same moment in time. lad. mired her perseverance and dedication, yet firmly believed that my lie would be different (except for trudging in the snow). Ilearned fromber example that women could have the same commitment to research that my male professors did. What I gained from Margaret was far more than just a role model from a distance. I gained a vision of the possible anda desire to achieve what was lacking. She was an apparition: a reminder of the past, and a hope for the future.”

[Dagmar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geschreven door de Nobelprijswinnares in economie in 2023. Informatief en interessant boek. Het is grotendeels een historische, maar ook wel economische analyse over de rol van vrouwen op de arbeidsmarkt en het “combineren” van een gezin. Af en toe wat repetitief, maar zeker een aanrader!

[Stephanie Herman · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[Siyu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A close look at the data for college educated women (to overcome data completeness issues, many conclusions were based on white women’s data only, although racial disparities were discussed). Conclusions:
- Eliminating occupational segregation (make all occupations equal number of men and women) would only explain away 1/3 of the gender pay gap.
- For the college educated cohort, controlling for position and especially leave-taking and time spent on doing job related activities, the pay gap is minimal. Women without children tend to progress at equal rates as men. It’s all about *time*.
- Couples with children usually have to trade off between couple equity and family income, because at least one parent needs the flexibility to perform unplanned childcare. Gender norms cause women to disproportionally take the flexible but less-high-earning-and-potential positions.
- Why is there a trade off? Greedy jobs. Jobs where working 60 hours a week would make you more than 1.5x the pay of working 40 hours, i.e. where additional hours bring increasing, not diminishing, returns. Example: academics, financiers, lawyers trying to make partners. Counter example: pharmacists. “In a world of greedy jobs, couple equity is expensive”.

That is all good, albeit way too repetitive in some chapters, such as the one refuting The Feminine Mystique. The pivotal role of the pill was highlighted effectively though.

My problem with the discussion is that it is positioning a job requiring 60 hours of work and the renumeration it brings as the ideal, what men and women should pursue in their “career jobs”. This is so CRAZY. People fought so hard for the 40-hour work week! 60 hours is 10 hours per day 6 days per week, which cannot possibly be good for human flourishing! The other 55%+ of the workforce without college degrees also deserves dignified, fulfilling jobs and family life!

So the normative value of the book, as another reviewer said, is dubious. It’s a thorough analysis of the data given the definitions (what constitutes a career, a family, income as the measure of utility).

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claudia Goldin is an economist at Harvard and one of the few people for whom if I heard she had a new book, I would try to read it as quickly as possible. Her 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology”, is one of the finest books on human capital and innovation available anywhere.

In “Career and Family”, Goldin brings together her work on careers, gender inequality, and the progress of women in entering the workforce and crafting careers while having children and building families. If one pays any attention at all to the news, it is likely safe to say that the critical issues on this set of topics have been “out there” for a long time, although the current state of play on these issues is unclear at times. Women have made great progress, right, but how much progress? Societal norms are changing about women in the workforce and how they can control their futures, but are they really? Between recent national politics, COVID, and threats of inflation or recession, are things getting better or getting worse, or just cycling?

Goldin’s book will help clarify much on these issues, although she is not pushing new answers or a sharply different view of reality on career and family issues for women. What Goldin does do is provide a really good way to organize the conflicting stimuli on this and use some actual data to help resolve the continuing issues and apparent contradictions on women in the workforce and at home.

Goldin organizes the book in terms of five different generational groups or cohorts that span 125 years of the modern struggle of women for workplace equity. The book is organized chronologically to follow the state of career and family issues up to the present by examining the progress of the five groups. For each group, the general state of law and society is discussed and important exemplars of path-breaking women are presented (first elected to Congress, first Cabinet member, etc.). Along with this, Goldin then discusses how career and family issues were discussed in the popular culture and extent media. Then she goes to the data, to show what the actual values and feelings of women at the time were regarding the values and their expectations regarding education, work, marriage, and family. This is not another example of “survey says!”pop research. Instead, the book make excellent use of a large number of large scale social surveys that directly pertain to these issues and Goldin’s analysis is enlightening. On several occasions, the general attitudes of women was far more sophisticated than they were given credit for by popular observers and commentators.

As the story moves on, new generations are discussed in a similar fashion. The chronological exposition goes up to the fifth group, including women born in the 1970s and 1980s. (The groupings do not go further due to lack of data.). There is much to process here, including some thoughts on how the COVID experience ties into the themes of the book, but the overwhelming punchline of the book is that subsequent groups of women learned from prior generations and actively built upon those who went before. Each group was addressing the particular problems it faced in the workplace, but each group also learned by how previous groups had addressed similar problems or had different values regarding those problems. For example, what difference does it make to pursue both a family and a career together versus pursuing a career and then a family? (It matters quite a bit, it turns out.)

The analyses of these generational groups is a highlight of the book. I have been skeptical of more pop generational analyses, not in principle but because thy often seem to oversimplify the choices of people who are more than their generational and social locations. “Career and Family” is an outstanding example of a well done and penetrating analysis of how the movement of generational groups helps clarify how women have progressed issues of work and family and how gender equity has evolved in US society through the 20th century.

There is a lot going on in the book. A startling insight for me what how, despite the intentions of many, gender inequities can persist in an occupation because of the way the occupation is structured and how such structures create the tension between “greedy” and “flexible” jobs that works to perpetuate wage and career gaps..

I highly recommend the book.

[Mad Hab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, scientific book on gender pay gap, maybe the onlye scientific one, or the only one i know.
Claudia Goldin got a well deserved Nobel prize in economics this year!

[Jacob Kristensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very much a Nobel prize-worthy piece! A must-read

[Hayley Hu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the data driven conclusion that women get paid less because families are prioritizing work on call from one person and family on call from the other. Surprisingly the author found that work discrimination and gender style contributes little to the pay gap. It's reassuring that the long term effects are by choice of the family but it's also not reassuring because the choice won't change if the system keeps the same.

[Natalia Galvis Arias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Renowned economist Claudia Goldin has made remarkable contributions to unraveling the complexities of the gender wage gap and deciphering the factors impacting women's career decisions. In her book, she delves into the pivotal question: What prompts women to curtail their engagement in the labor market, exploring the intricacies of these decisions and identifying the specific life events that catalyze such changes?

[Kaitlynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommending this to everyone. To close the gender gap we need companies to incentivize temporal flexibility, more perfect substitutions, and decrease the cost of childcare. To the group 1 through 5 women before me, thank you!

[Emily Grantham · Rating 5 out of 5]

“if i won a nobel, i wouldn’t still be teaching” - one of my profs 🙏🙏🙏

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate, provides an economic analysis of women's issues including generation based analysis of education and professional outcomes and the wage gap. Goldin's clear analysis is a beautiful demonstration of the progress for women in terms of economic power and freedom. She points out how important reproductive technology has been on this front, specifically the oral contraceptives. However, Goldin's book doesn't consider the effects this has had on the economic prospects of men and the secondary effects this has on the marriageability of men and the tertiary effects this has on family formation and the size of subsequent generations. It would have been interesting to see her address these issues in this work. Moreover, there are a number of assumption built into Goldin's work that I am not sure are broadly shared by women and men. For instance, there does appear to be a revealed preference for withdrawal from the labor market when a woman has a partner who is able to provide for a family of whatever desired size. A closer look at how widespread and sincere such preferences are among women would have been a useful accompaniment as well.


Nonetheless, Goldin's rigorous analysis demonstrates that economic progress for women has been substantial. The wage gap has narrowed significantly over the last half century but remains stubbornly significant especially for college-educated women in "greedy" professions, i.e. those that reward greater time investment with amplifying renumeration. The primary factor that explains the wage gap between men and women is investment child birth and parenting (evolutionary psychology strikes again!). Although men have increasingly become invested in childcare, especially in affluent couples, it is essentially always more taxing on the woman's ability to invest in professional advancement. Thus, the careers of young professional women tend to wane as their families grow. This finding contrasts starkly with popular narratives about the wage gap being a function of discrimination or even as a function of different types of work. As the economist like to say, the wage gap is an endogenous effect.

Consequently, I think the takeaway from Goldin's work should be that we've made amazing progress given the constraints of biology. Unless and until biology is miraculously changed by new technology, which seems unlikely even from a quite positive techno-utopian outlook, greater returns may be achieved by aligning sex-influenced preferences and abilities with economic and personal outcomes that help sustain a population of robust families. Other recent books like Richard Reeves' Of Boys and Men and Melissa Kearney's The Two-Parent Privilege suggest we may have designed our institutions in ways that privilege female success in education and careers relative to men and subsequently, there are not enough eligible bachelors to go around. Maybe this can be fixed with a male-specific fix, but it appears to some extent the battle between the sexes is partially zero sum in its current configuration.

[Alaa]

Claudia Goldin’s reflection on Margaret Reid offers such a poignant glimpse into how Reid, then seen by Goldin as an elderly figure, “grudging through the snow in a long, grey woolen coat and short, black rubber galoshes”, was actually a pioneering force in economics.

Margaret Reid's work in the 1930s, which emphasised the economic value of unpaid household labour, is as integral to the story of GDP as Simon Kuznets’s contributions.

While Kuznets is often credited with developing the methodologies that shaped modern GDP calculations, Reid’s advocacy for including unpaid labour challenged and expanded the conventional definitions of economic activity.

Her work aimed to offer a more comprehensive view of economic contributions, highlighting the substantial yet often invisible role of household labour in the economy.

Kuznets, on the other hand, focused GDP on market transactions and measurable economic activity, setting the standards that remain central to economic statistics today. His decision not to include unpaid labour reflected the difficulties of quantifying such contributions but established a framework that defined economic measurement for decades.

Both Reid and Kuznets played pivotal roles in shaping our understanding of GDP. Reid’s efforts to broaden the scope of economic measurement complement Kuznets’s foundational work, reflecting different perspectives on how we value and measure economic activity.

Reid’s career, along with that of her mentor Hazel Kyrk, also reflects broader societal themes. Both women achieved notable academic success while navigating the challenges faced by women in academia during their time, including the choice to remain “unmarried and childless”

Goldin’s reflection underscores the evolving perspective on women’s roles in both career and family, revealing how the field of economics has grown in its recognition and valuation of women's contributions.

The book itself explores the changing experiences and choices of college-educated women across five generational groups. It contrasts earlier generations, who often had to choose between career and family, with more recent ones, who expect to balance both. By focusing on women born up to around 1980, the book examines how evolving expectations have shaped contemporary women’s lives. It also illustrates how shifts in marriage, childbirth, and career patterns reflect broader societal changes, with each generation learning from the previous one’s successes and failures.

This was such an incredible read. It was personally important and so much needed.

[A Raz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book tells about the history of women’s employment since the late 19th century until today in the US. Claudia divides history into five periods from where initially women could only choose between career and family until now where women can have both simultaneously.

The book also explains why there is a pay gap between women and men. Indeed, gender discrimination has its role but the actual answer is way more nuanced.

Overall, this book provides us with some insights into the role of women in the labor market and how this evolves along with the transforming jobs particularly in the post-COVID era. A very recommended book for career women, economists, or those who are simply interested in the field.

[Juan David Diez Cortés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro interesante. Más que brindar nueva información, presenta una línea del tiempo muy bien explicada de datos que ya estaban disponibles y alcanza entrar un poco en el posible futuro post-covid. También creo que haber salido justo en los momentos finales de pandemia hace que algunas de las hipotesis planteadas tengan vacíos. Creo que es muy interesante ver todo el camino que se ha ganado en terminos de igualdad salarial y paridad laboral, también es esperanzador. Sin embargo, también noto que muchos de los paradigmas que han ido cambiando (en mi opinión) de manera positiva en el último siglo se sienten un poco en retroceso desde que salimos oficialmente de la pandemia. Espero estar equivocado y que la tendencia vista por Goldin pueda continuar, pero quizá es bueno preguntarnos que pasará en un escenario menos "optimista". Goldin traza un camino muy detallado que vale mucho la pena leer y que se va bastante rápido.

[Monica Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be extremely helpful in understanding what we mean when we say the gender pay gap. I think Goldin illustrates the history of career and family in a helpful way to see how each point of history can be broken down in a general sense. There is systemic issues and societal issues but also our choices do hold a great power (the work we choose, taking breaks, etc). I would like to read more on couple equity after reading

[Joel]

Bra uppmärksammande bok om utbildade kvinnors arbetsmarknad och lön ojämlikhet i USA under modern tid. Dock blev värket lite väl upprepande av olika faktorer som egebtligen kändes som självklara och samma problem i olika kapitel. Men boken var inte hela tiden så, utan kunde ge mig ytterligare insikter.
Roliga böcker men läser till bokklubben (seminarium)

[Barb Middleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascination look at the history of women working and factors that influence the gender gap in different professions. One argument is that it’s caused by interruptions in career paths due to family and the decrease in hours as opposed to men. Makes me glad my husband was able to support my daughter’s family so she could pursue her career with less interruptions.

[Giuliepie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it’s more of a 3.5.

I really enjoyed the writing style and the content. However, I wished it was something more life changing. Maybe I spoiled it myself by having very high expectations.

[Ignacia Yañez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aunque humildemente creo que podría haber tenido una mejor edición para no repetir párrafos, sigo dándole 5 estrellas a la gran Claudia Goldin 💖 trascendental.

[NYguuurl · Rating 5 out of 5]

WINNER of the nobel price in economics (2023). A must-read to understand the gender earnings gap. A generational study from 1880 to 2020 including the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on women and the desire to have both, career and family.

[Wenxuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ Career or Family? - We can choose equality ”

Today, couples of all kinds are struggling harder than ever to strike a balance between career and family, work and life. As citizens, we are growing increasingly conscious of the significance and value of caring for our families, both at present and for future generations. We start to fully recognize its costs, including lost income, stalled careers, trade-offs between partners, and the tough demands placed on single mothers or fathers.

How to balance family responsibilities and career advancement has also been the focus of social attention. Regrettably, family responsibilities typically weigh more heavily on women. In almost every OECD country, the proportion of women with tertiary education is approximately 10 percentage points higher than that of men, but the median income of women working full-time is 10 to 20 percent lower than that of men. Where does this gap originate? And how have highly educated women historically divided their time between career and family?

In "Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity", Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin classifies college-educated women from the early 20th century to the present into five groups, conducts in-depth research on their aspirations in career, marriage, children and other aspects, as well as the reality of the obstacles they encounter, and the evolution of the intergenerational process. The data and historical evidence cited in this book are very solid. According to Golding, inequality exists on both sides of the coin: career and family, and gender pay equality at work has a greater chance of being achieved if equality within the family is attained. Women have curbed their careers as part of a rational family response to the labour market. But the good news is that innovative advancements in technology can assist women in gaining more power in the workplace and at home.



· Five Generations of Women's Choices: Careers? Family? Or Both?

According to the role of "family" and "career" in the life cycle of women, the author classifies women with bachelor's degrees of different generations into five groups. The earliest group of women were born in the late 19th century (when US census data were available) and the latest in the early 1980s. These groups are divided by year of birth and cover different time periods. The span of the first group is 20 years, the second group is 26 years, the third group is 20 years, the fourth group is only 14 years, and the fifth group is 21 years.

The first group of women were born between 1878 and 1897 and graduated from college between 1900 and 1920. Based on their lifetime experiences, their lifetime achievements are the most uneven among all groups. Among them, nearly one-third never married, and half had no children (or adopted children). A college degree enables them to obtain well-paying jobs to support themselves and maintain independence. However, few of the women whose partners are married and have children are working. Social norms and hiring rules such as marital discrimination and nepotism rules often deprive married women of their careers. The huge domestic demands make it challenging for them to balance career and family.

Group 2 - Work first and then start a family: The second group is the transitional group born between 1898 and 1923 and graduated from college between 1920 and 1945. This group started out much like the first one, with very low marriage rates; but the latter part of this group is similar to the third group, with high marriage rates, a low age of first marriage, and many children. At that time, many cheap domestic labor-saving facilities reduced the time women spent on housework; the economic revolution significantly increased the demand for white-collar workers and salespeople, and enhanced the return on human capital such as literacy and numeracy. Changes in the labor market have raised the employment rates and returns to education for women, including those who are married. But the Great Depression of the 1930s threw women out of work. As the Great Depression worsened, married women's job opportunities became much more limited.

Group 3 - Start a family before working: The third group of women born between 1924 and 1943 are more similar to each other than any other group. They display similar aspirations and achievements, marry at a young age, have high rates of children, and have similar college majors and first jobs. More than 90 percent of the female college graduates in the third group got married, mostly at an early age. Almost all married ones have children. This group of women generally had jobs after graduation and even after marriage. But when they have children and raise them, they leave the labor force. However, most of the women who left the workforce because of their children later returned to work, especially teachers and white-collar workers, and some did not leave the workforce at all due to life needs or career aspirations.

Group 4 - Start a career before family: The fourth group was born between 1944 and 1957 and graduated from college between the mid-1960s and late 1970s. These women have clearly learned from the experiences of their predecessors. When it comes to marriage, children, careers, and employment, the shift from Group 3 to Group 4 is the most significant among these groups. Their coming of age coincided with the "silent revolution," the advent and spread of the contraceptive pill, which allowed young single women to postpone marriage and childbearing, giving them more time and energy to devote to their careers. The fourth group was the first group of women to aspire to the highest-paying and most prestigious careers such as lawyers, doctors, and executives. They aim to achieve what their male colleagues have been pursuing: to be financially better off, to be respected by their peers, and to reach the highest possible position in their desired field of work.

Group 5 - Career with family: They were born between 1958 and 1978 and began graduating from university in 1980. This group of women perceived the miscalculation of the fourth group - that what was postponed might never be accomplished. So they declared that career would no longer be an obstacle to family. They enter professional and graduate schools. They are on an equal footing with and outnumber men in college. They continued to marry and have children later in life, and even postponed marriage and childbearing again, but their fertility rate increased significantly. Like the fourth group, they had access to a variety of reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilisation (IVF). In this case, the assistance is assisted conception rather than contraception. This last group basically desires both career and family.



·The root cause of inequality: greedy work

As the desire for a career and a family grows, an important part of countless careers is becoming clear and important: for many people on the career track, work is avaricious. People who work overtime, weekends or evenings can earn more, even at significantly higher hourly rates.
 
The greed of work means that couples with children or other caregiving responsibilities can benefit from a division of Labour. Women will still be able to pursue demanding careers, but one spouse will focus primarily on the family, leaving the office or workplace to rush home in case of an emergency. The parent's position should be fairly flexible and generally not expected to respond to emails or phone calls at 10 p.m. You don't have to miss your kid's soccer game for a merger. In contrast, the other parent is available on call at work. The potential impact on promotions, promotions and earnings for those who are always available to their families is obvious.

The work of professionals and managers has always been greedy. For example, lawyers always stay up late and work overtime. Scholars are always judged by their intellectual output, and are expected to keep thinking even at night; Most doctors and vets are on call 24 hours a day.

Since the early 1980s, as income inequality has risen, the value of greedy work has soared. The incomes of those at the top of the income distribution have ballooned, and the rewards for workers at the top have been bigger. The jobs with the longest hours and the least flexibility pay significantly more; Wages for other jobs have stagnated. As a result, some jobs that were hard for women to break into in the first place, such as those in finance, have seen the biggest increases in pay over the past few decades. The private equity partners who are involved in the deal from start to finish, the ones who solve the modeling puzzle, the ones who attend every meeting and late-night dinner, will be the ones most likely to receive big bonuses and coveted promotions.
The gender pay gap for college graduates has remained constant in recent decades, even as women have gained seniority and positions, and an important reason may be rising income inequality. Perhaps this is why, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the gender pay gap for college graduates was larger than for the population as a whole. Women have been fighting to be the first, both to be empowered and to fight the powerful currents of pervasive income inequality.
   
Greedy work also means that conjugal equity has been and continues to be abandoned in order to increase family income. When marital justice is abandoned, gender equality usually goes with it. The gender norms we have inherited have been reinforced in a variety of ways: by assigning more childcare responsibilities to mothers and more home care responsibilities to adult daughters. The biggest obstacle women face in the workplace is the demand for time, which is related to childbearing and family care. At the same time, the father will also pay the price, losing time with the child.



·What will your future career and family look like?

The other side of gender inequality is family inequality. Why can't dual-earner families equally share the joys and responsibilities of parenting? They could do that, too, but it would be giving up ready income - and that's a lot of money. A couple with 50/50 responsibilities may be happier, but also poorer.

In the "greedy work" structure, men start families and advance because women give up their careers and devote more time to their families. But both sides have been deprived of their fair share. Men are deprived of the warmth of being more involved in family affairs, and women are deprived of the opportunity to better develop their careers. What to do in this situation?

First, each couple must make their own decisions to achieve more equality. Every couple should know that the happiness of love depends on the minimum level of happiness of one spouse. The second point is to make social and institutional changes to help couples achieve the first point more easily. For it is clear that when "greedy work" is well paid, couples are in some sense attracted to this division of labor. Eventually, women will step back from their careers and contribute more to their families.

So how can we change the market? It's certainly harder, and it involves making flexible working easier to achieve. The coronavirus outbreak since 2020 has actually brought a ray of hope to this issue. In many ways, the cost of flexible working has come down. Any solution must involve the cost of reducing the comfort, time flexibility in question. The easiest way to do this is to create a perfect substitute for yourself. Use technology to deliver information to a perfect substitute, but make sure it doesn't cause distortion. Substitution among workers is the key to reducing excessive hourly wages for long hours and on-call work. If two employees can substitute well or even perfectly for each other, then when one of them has to take a vacation, the other can seamlessly fill in for the former. Clients, patients, students, and customers can be transferred from one skilled employee to another with no loss of information, no change in trust, and no difference in efficiency.
       
We can also create effective replacement teams, as has been done in certain health jobs, where the cost of professionals is already so high that work units also want alternative teams. Pediatrics is a good example. Pediatricians have set up shift teams to make sure they don't need to be on call all the time. Veterinarians and anesthesiologists have done the same thing. Is this the commercialisation of an important career? Maybe. But that's how some of the highest-paying, highly trained professional jobs work. When you have surgery, you may start talking to your surgeon months ago, but only meet the anesthesiologist who is keeping you alive seven minutes before the operation. An anesthesiologist is a group practitioner who has a contractual relationship with a surgeon or hospital and is assigned solely based on the needs of a single operation.
   
The long road to the future must include reducing the cost of flexibility and may also involve the restructuring of some jobs. This is not a zero-sum game. Gender equality is not just about women. It's not fair for couples to have men on call at work and women on call at home. When the cost of flexibility is reduced, we will address this and achieve gender equality and couple equality, but this will require men to demand greater time flexibility and more control over working hours.

In general, on the issue of gender pay gap, the author shows us that the key to the problem is not the subjective gender discrimination of individuals, but a more general problem: the conflict between efficiency and equity within a family. If the family is the unit, then in the current competitive moment, one person "greedy" work, ready in the workplace, the other person flexible work, ready in the family, is the rational path to maximize the interests of the family as a whole. But because the people who choose to stay in the family are often women, they tend to gradually widen the income gap with men after the birth of their first child.

The book also shows the balance and struggle of intellectual women in the past 100 years between career and family. Time is fair, no one will be more than others on a minute a second. People have to choose what to choose and how to use their time better. Intellectual women have been searching for answers to this question for more than a century. Along the way, they break barriers, close gaps, and pass on lessons from generation to generation. What we can find is that the main factor driving the change in the choices and circumstances of each group of women is not their own preferences - what they pursue has not changed, but more external constraints and historical circumstances. Each generation looks at the life of the previous generation and learns from its experiences and lessons; Each generation tries to make what it considers to be the most rational decision within the social and technological constraints of the time.

Goldin wants us to see that the key to the problem is not a group of people, or a single person, not a subjective preference or obstruction. That may be good news, but it also makes the road ahead a lot harder. In the words of the authors: "To achieve the desired balance in an uncertain future, it's not just women and families that need to change. We must rethink the nation's work and care systems in order to pave the way forward. It's just a matter of time."

[Jack Kammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rejoinder to Claudia Goldin’s Nobel-Winning Book

Addressing Discussion Question 9: “To what extent do you think the book’s central message will resonate with men?”

Part 1

On June 9, 2021, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece titled, “Are Vets and Pharmacists Showing How to Make Careers Work for Moms?” His lede also made reference only to “moms.” He was writing about the book that two years later would win The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the official title of the award known informally as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

That book is Career and Family: Women’s Century-long Journey Toward Equity by Harvard Economics Professor Claudia Goldin. It proposes various changes in the nature of work, which we will discuss later, but for now suffice it to say that Kristof ended his homage to Goldin’s book by saying “The critical step, Goldin advises: ‘Get men on board.’”

As a long-time advocate for improvements in the work-life prospects of men and boys, I was all on board with getting men on board. But it was clear from Kristof’s column that Goldin was going to have trouble enticing men to climb onto the train she was engineering, a conveyance thoroughly designed and managed for the needs and comfort of women traveling to destinations most salubrious and welcoming to them.

Optimist that I was, after reading Kristof’ column I wrote to Professor Goldin at her Harvard email address to ask if she might be a guest on my podcast “Good Will Toward Men”:

“Professor Goldin,” I wrote, “I haven’t read your book, only Nicholas Kristof’s column. Will you be a guest on my podcast? I’d like to talk with you about getting women on board about allowing men to get on board.”

She replied, “Perhaps I’m being dense, but I don’t understand what you mean by ‘getting women on board about allowing men to get on board.’ Do you really mean that mothers stand in the way of fathers who would like to teach, diaper, care for, drive to school, and so on the children? Or that women stand in the way of men who would like to clear the dishes, do the shopping, schedule the doctor’s visits, clean the toilets, and so on?”

I wrote back, “Some women (how many? a subject for research) who do not have fabulous or even minimally fulfilling careers in business or academia jealously protect their careers as mothers and wish to maintain maternal supremacy in parenting, just as men back in the day wanted to maintain paternal supremacy in economic careers. There may be a relationship for some, perhaps many women, between their ability to maximize their work/life balance options and their husbands’ or prospective husbands’ willingness/requirement to minimize and sacrifice theirs.”

Professsor Goldin, to her great credit, did not ignore me. She replied, “My work is related to the pursuit of career and family. But not so much with regard to your notion that women protect their maternal supremacy. In fact, I don’t know any mothers who would not want their husbands to do 50–50 with the children and around the home.”

I was struck by this on two counts:

She dismissed my concern about maternal supremacy as a “notion,” rather than as an obvious phenomenon that has the additional support of research and candid acknowledgments from self-aware women.

She reminded me of the apocryphal absurdity that Pauline Kael, film critic for the New York Times, reportedly but never actually said about her surprise that Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election because she — an artsy New York intellectual— didn’t know anyone who voted for him. But here was a tenured Harvard professor, many or most of whose female associates were likely other women with fabulous, fulfilling and rewarding careers, actually expressing disbelief that any mothers are primarily invested in and jealous of their maternal role and position of honor, respect and day-to-day control in their families.

I did not further pursue Claudia Goldin as a podcast guest who was ready, willing and able to express good will toward men in the context of her book.

Then when Professor Goldin’s book won the Nobel, I knew I had to read it.

Career and Family really is a magnificent piece of research — as far as it goes and in the direction it goes. But if its purpose was to inspire an optimistic answer to its Discussion Question 9 (“To what extent do you think the book’s central message will resonate with men?”) it fell far short and wide of its mark. The book is almost exclusively about equity for women and the myriad factors that complicate reaching that goal. It seems to have no awareness of the limitations men face in achieving fulfillment in both career and family.

Whether men resonate with the book or not will really make no difference as to whether women will continue to get the changes they continue to demand in their singular best interest. But whether men resonate will have a lot to do with everyone’s happiness, including the happiness of men and boys, husbands and fathers, sons and sons-in-law for decades or centuries into the future. It will also influence how much energy women need to expend overcoming the friction of men’s feeling treated poorly, a feeling men are unlikely to express openly because we are deeply conditioned not to be wheels that squeak. Breakdowns of various kinds are much less trouble. We grind away so as not to be rendered obsolete or replaceable.

I write this book for Claudia Goldin, her friends and all the powerful women like them who really do want the full and equal participation of men in their families, including cases where marriages fail. That is where the rubber meets the road. Honoring and welcoming men’s heavy investment in parenting during marriage is one thing. But the possibility (should we call it a “notion”?) that after divorce an ex-wife might act upon the call of maternal supremacy, assume its privileges, and take the kids far, far away, is hardly an inducement for men to climb aboard Goldin’s train to who-knows-where.

Divorce is only one potential derailment for men on Goldin’s train. There are many dangerous crossings and other safety hazards that will be obvious and concerning to inspectors familiar with special male vulnerabilities.

So far, however, the railroad doesn’t seem much to care about transporting men as well as women to a happier future. We need powerful, accomplished, bilaterally egalitarian women to join the call to lay much more track across terrain that men, at long last, must be fully involved in surveying so we can map the routes we need to take to our promised destination.

How can we expect men to resonate with Career and Family otherwise?

Part 2

In Part 1 we surveyed Claudia Goldin’s Nobel-winning book about helping women “have it all” by encouraging men to “get on board” with sweeping changes whose effects on men Goldin doesn’t recognize or consider.

That’s been the problem with the modern women’s movement since pretty much the day it began. It was never a negotiation; for men it has always been a shakedown, a forced march. Seldom if ever have women said, “Here’s what we want. What would you want in exchange?” The necessity of that crucial step was lost behind the ideas that 1) women have nothing men would want and 2) if men did want anything women had, women weren’t interested in sharing it, so they wouldn’t embarrass themselves by asking.

Feminism has always said that no one gives up power willingly. Such zero-sum thinking is the essential reason that feminism has led to so much strife and imbalance. What feminism has never been willing to consider is that people all the time share power willingly because doing so often results in greater power available to everyone.

Methinks the reason feminism has been so totally averse to sharing what it has with men is because feminism knows that what women have in their traditional domain is far, far more valuable and precious than what men have in theirs. To me, it looks like this:

Images of “The Patriarchy” and “The Matrexx” by author using Bing Image Creator

Believe me when I say that you will not find a man more committed to equal sharing of the two domains — in both directions — than I am. The Big Red Heart always meant more to me than the Golden Dollar Sign. I think there are a lot of men like me in that regard, many more than would feel comfortable saying so — sort of as it was back in the day for any woman who averred that she really wasn’t all that interested in staying home and raising children.

We’ve recognized for decades that it’s a pity to cajole women into a slot that is not optimal for them. We need to take notice of the same fact for men.

As Goldin points out in her Nobel-winning book, most people will want some combination of the two domains. Both have a lot to offer. Women were first to make that reasonable demand. In fact, until women entered the corporate world in big numbers, there was no such concept, no such phrase as “work-life balance.” Men just called it The Rat Race. We can thank women for leading the way on that.

But not for deciding and insisting on how far is far enough for their purposes.

Let’s think of Goldin as an investment banker. Lately, she’s been talking up this great new security called work-life balance for men. It has been a huge success with women, her primary clientele, but now men are a rate-limiting step for women and she has to get men on board to achieve her female-centered goals.

But for men, investing in Goldin’s bank is much less secure than it is for women. And for men facing the decision of how to invest their time and opportunities for a happy life, there are much safer investments readily available to them. The benefits they get from their jobs and careers are clear and generally reliable. On the other hand, they have heard numerous horror stories about men’s investments in home and family life — especially their emotional investments in their kids — being completely wiped out in the event of a market crash — AKA divorce or separation.

Though Goldin seems not to know it, many women, when push comes to shove, will do whatever they need to do to keep their investment in the Big Red Heart treated as Preferred Stock and Class A Shares, while relegating men to Common Stock and Class B Shares. The unwritten by-laws of family governance are easily bent in women’s favor by tearful pleadings to judges, false statements of how they are “in fear” of the children’s fathers, and how the children suddenly don’t want to see or be with him anymore.

This last tactic is known as Parental Alienation. Professional feminists are currently waging selfish, cynical, advocacy-masquerading-as-research campaigns in state legislatures around the country, including in Maryland where I testified to a legislative committee on the matter. The legislative efforts would make it inadmissible for a man to present evidence of how the mother has turned the kids against him; all she would have to do to bar him from seeking the judge’s help with that problem is to allege that the father has committed domestic violence. Allegations therefore abound to render innocent fathers defenseless and effectively guilty and unworthy of the love and affection of their children.

Men who take Goldin’s investment advice and reduce their career time to increase their family time might find themselves before divorce judges who not only reduce the fathers’ parenting time to Zoo Daddy visitation status, but, in the ultimate revelation of just how unequal inequality can be, might calculate their child support obligations not on what the fathers currently make with their new part-time careers, but on “imputed income” — how much they could be, should be, making if they applied themselves fully to their money-earning careers.

Here’s a thought experiment. How much would women have invested their time, money and hopes in pursuing advanced professional degrees had there been no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or myriad other regulations to ensure their investments would not be trounced and trashed by male chauvinism? Notice, then, please that we are nowhere near having an Equal Parenting Opportunity Commission. We are nowhere near establishing a rebuttable presumption for joint custody in the event of divorce, even despite a strong scientific consensus that it is the best outcome for most children.

Note also that we are nowhere near counting or caring about whether sole custody fathers are “under-represented” among sole custody parents.

Along the same lines of happy hopes being unfulfilled, let’s talk about some of the dangers men face if they hop on board the train that Claudia Goldin is engineering to take men to a college-educated women’s version of Barbie Land, where women can be whatever they want, and men are “just men.”

What will happen if your wife sours for some reason on her once-fabulous career? What if she tires of applying for grants that are never granted? What if the pressure to “publish or perish” is exhausting and much more stressful than she wanted it to be? Will she consider you ungallant and unsupportive for your unwillingness to leave the family-career life you have built, at Goldin’s urging, and return to work full-time so your wife can pursue her new happy hope of family fulfillment? Could that lack of gallantry be spun into grounds for divorce, leading possibly to the loss of your kids, to whom, again at Goldin’s urging, you transferred so much of your career ambition?

Investigate before you invest: Why do we so often hear “Happy wife, happy life”? Is there any factual basis for saying “If momma ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy”?

War stories about men having their hearts ripped out in divorce are legion. But divorce is only the tip of the iceberg. Women’s ability to protect their domains, their supremacy in home life, runs much wider and deeper. Even women who demand and expect equality at work still seem to harbor old notions of superiority at home.

Here are a few of the private issues that, along with matters of government mentioned above, need to be discussed and fairly resolved before men will know that Goldin’s investment plan for them is not just another overreach toward female privilege.

In two-career couples, each spouse has a boss at work. Before the man agrees to invest in family life as much as women feel safe to do, he may need to bargain hard to explicitly overcome the default expectation that the wife will be the one and only boss on domestic issues at home.

(Phyllis Schlafly, the world’s chief opponent of mere equality for women, had a delightful way of expressing women’s regime of control in household affairs. In her book The Power of the Positive Woman, she tells of a hoodwinked husband saying “When my wife and I were married, we agreed that I would make all the major decisions, and she would make the minor ones. I decide what legislation Congress should pass, what treaties the president should sign, and whether the United States should stay in the United Nations. My wife makes the minor decisions — such as how we spend our money, whether I should change my job, where we should live, and where we go on our vacations.”¹)

A big concern for career women is cleaning the house. Is the woman the final say on how much cleaning is the “right” amount of cleaning? Suppose the woman insists that the toilets should be scrubbed every week but you found in your bachelor years that you seldom caught Bubonic Plague having them scrubbed only every other week. Who decides who’s right and how your time must be expended? That, of course, is just an example — but one that Claudia Goldin raised in her email to me expressing doubt that women ever seek supremacy in home life:

“Do you really mean that mothers stand in the way of fathers who would like to teach, diaper, care for, drive to school, and so on the children? Or that women stand in the way of men who would like to clear the dishes, do the shopping, schedule the doctor’s visits, clean the toilets, and so on?”

Yes, Professor Goldin, I do — though you frame parenting in the least attractive terms when you ask that question. Imagine how we would scoff, how we did scoff, at men who protested that they were fully supportive of women entering men’s world of work by saying “Do you really think I would object if my wife helped with the financial burden by having a part-time job at the 7-Eleven?”

A big concern that stay-at-home fathers have expressed to me is their need to insist and assert strongly to their wives that they, the fathers, “parent different” and that their style of childrearing must be respected as the equal of the mother’s. Men often find that relinquishing the Primary Nurturer role can be as difficult for women as giving up the Primary Provider role was and to a much lesser degree still can be for men.

Are women ready for all this? Are they ready for the give as well as the take? Or are they perhaps no more enthusiastic about having men assert their equality at home than men fifty years ago were about having women assert their equality in careers, government, and business? Consider all the work, all the government reforms and interventions, all the programs, all the philanthropic funding that has been required to reach our current level of women’s equality in men’s traditional domain. Nothing anywhere even remotely comparable has been undertaken for men’s equality in women’s traditional domain.

Men will be poorly advised to get on board Goldin’s train anytime soon.

It’s really a pretty simple equation. “Career and Family,” the title phrase of Goldin’s book, is equivalent to “Family and Career,” with the first word in each triplet representing the non-traditional aspirations of women and men, respectively. The drive for family and career for men deserves no less care and attention than the drive for career and family for women.

So, just as Goldin urges men to “get on board,” Goldin would do well to urge women to get on board with getting men on board. And to do that, we need to have deep, honest and sometimes difficult negotiations about family innovations in which neither side will only give or only get.

If there is anything ready for men to get on board right now it is the fledgling men’s movement. Father-friendly attorney and former NOW president Karen DeCrow put it like this: “It’s hard to have a sex-role revolution when only one sex is participating.”

The men’s movement would welcome the help of influential women like Claudia Goldin, as well. It is, after all, women who have just about all the Mojo on gender issues these days. Men need lots more than we have for our locomotion.

[aris atha · Rating 4 out of 5]

muy relevante como trata el papel de las mujeres en la economía mediante el uso de datos, política e historia económicos, sin asustar ni pecar de extremismo

[Nicole Bison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A girlboss manifesto

[ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

i usually don't put books i read for class on goodreads but i'm 2 books behind on my yearly goal and i had to read 100-ish pages of this for my econ class so i may as well profit (plus maybe it'll motivate me to actually finish the book so i can take it out of my "currently reading")

read for my econ of gender and the family seminar! so far, genuinely a really interesting book that describes concepts and historical developments very clearly. i like the division of women into the five groups across time and the descriptions of what major events, technological changes, or policies affected the career and family choices of the women in each of these groups. i definitely want to finish the rest of the book someday (though who knows when that'll be). honestly sometimes i think about the fact that i'm a woman and what that means for me and my future and what it has meant for the people who came before me like my mom or my professors or these uchicago economists of the 50s etc. etc. and it seems too big to ever wrap my head around. it's very interesting to consider what options are available to me as a woman in the 21st century, though it's also giving me mild existential dread right now since i am no way ready to start thinking about those questions, even though they have definitely been shaping the opportunities i've had and the decisions i've made thus far in life!

i also think reading this somewhat reaffirmed my interest in econ as a field that isn't just abstract mathematical models and graphs with limited applicability to real life, but can actually have such interesting real life applications, especially when you ask very intersectional questions and try to understand the variety of factors that can influence our decisions on an individual and societal level. kinda cool i guess even if i still feel very unemployable

adding to previous thoughts now that i’ve finished the book: very tolerable for a non-fiction book (i have terrible attention span and always want to fall asleep when reading non-fiction) and definitely recommended for anyone even slightly interested in family economics or questions of labor division and couple equity, because it’s written in a way that feels accessible even to people without knowledge of economic terms or models. i really liked the case studies of lawyers and pharmacists as professions later on! the takeaways from the later chapters feel a lot easier to remember than the ones about the five groups since the five groups were so focused on describing a timeline, but i’m bad with history, so a lot of the events kind of blended together for me. i need to read more “intellectual” content haha