Claudia Goldin's Nobel a win for women in workplace
Very early on Monday, Harvard economist Claudia Goldin released a working paper called “Why Women Won.” It chronicles 155 critical moments in the modern history of women's rights.
A few hours later, a 156th occurred: Goldin herself was awarded the economics Nobel.
Goldin is only the third woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the first to do so solo - that is, not sharing with a male colleague. But her achievement is a milestone primarily because of why she won: for providing “the first comprehensive account of women's earnings and labour market participation through the centuries.” The award represents formal (and overdue) recognition that gender equity is key to understanding how economies can flourish.
Goldin has excavated or compiled data on topics as varied as academic grades in elite college courses to 1930s records showing which firms fired women when they got married. She has used these data points to reconstruct how norms, institutions, expectations, policies and technological innovations (such as the pill) influence gender equity, which in turn influences employment and earnings outcomes for both sexes.
Among other things, her research has upended politically convenient but overly simplistic understandings of the gender pay gap.
Conservatives sometimes argue that men, on average, earn much more than women because men and women choose very different kinds of occupations (finance vs. nursing, for example). Liberals instead often blame discrimination. There's an element of truth in both storylines. But neither explains a pattern evident in data today: Within any given occupation, the gender pay gap is relatively small when people enter the labor force. It widens only later, usually after a woman has a child.
This is true despite women's tremendous gains in education, legislative victories and increasingly diverse career choices.
Goldin argues that the persistence of the gender wage gap is in part because of the rise of “greedy work,” or the idea that employees who are willing to work longer hours get rewarded so much more — disproportionally more than the extra time put in. She has found that doubling the hours worked typically results in much more than double the earnings; inversely, halving the hours typically results in much less than half the earnings.
Employers generally place a premium on being on call, all the time, especially in high-wage professions.
This means that even if two opposite-sex spouses start out with equal pay and egalitarian views toward child-rearing, they still might sort into more traditional gender roles to maximize their household income — with Mom specializing in being “on call” at home and Dad specializing in being “on call” at work. If both instead went “halfsies” and scaled back on work equally, they'd be giving up a lot more money than if they specialized.
Clearly, social norms and preferences play a role in these outcomes. But Goldin's research shows that workplace structures matter, too.
Years ago, when Goldin first told me about this pharmacy research, I asked whether her findings were really so translatable to other fields. Weren't some occupations always going to be “greedy”?
But Goldin is a preternatural optimist. She pointed to another occupation that has made complex, high-stakes work more substitutable across workers, and thus less “greedy” of any single worker's time: obstetrics. “If we can figure this out for the most important thing,” she said — bringing new life into the world — “why can't we do it for all the others?”