When I saw the news that Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, I was just taking my first sip of black coffee.
“That’s well-deserved,” I thought, reading that although she was the third woman to win the prize, she was the first to win it solo. Then:“I should write about this.”
My still-caffeineless brain lurched into action, with a few gray cells beginning to outline a draft while the rest catalogued everything about my morning that could be shifted (meetings, laundry, my own breakfast) and everything that could not (diaper changes, daycare drop off, my toddler’s breakfast).
Goldin is best known for her work on women’s careers and how they can be derailed by marriage and motherhood. I felt hyperaware, in that moment, of my competing devotions: Working and mothering. How quickly could I write this piece? Only as quickly as my maternal duties would allow. The irony tasted as bitter as the coffee.
It is an especially apt time for the Nobel Committee to recognize Goldin’s work. In the US, a post-COVID-19 pandemic rebound in the women’s workforce participation rate has narrowed the gap between the genders to the smallest on record. This has come as a pleasant surprise after a steep decline in 2020, when the female-dominated service sector was hammered by COVID-19 closures, and schools and daycare centers sent children home.
Women’s workforce resilience can be attributed in part to a strong economy (despite constant prognostications of a coming recession), schools and daycare centers reopening (the latter in part due to government aid that has just expired), and rising wages (which compensate for high daycare costs).
Also vitally important: The greater flexibility offered by employers. Women have always needed a bit more wiggle room to earn a living outside the home because most of the responsibility of running a household and raising the next generation falls to them.
Goldin’s work has long illustrated the importance of flexibility to mothers’earning power. She has studied women’s labor on a sweeping, epic scale — scanning decades of history like a drone camera surveying the Okavango Delta in a wildlife documentary. She has also zoomed in tight, like a microscope, on individual professions.
We know from her research that what we now call “remote work” has long been a key part of women’s ability to contribute to the economy. When the industrial era called workers into factories and offices, women’s involvement in the formal economy started to decline. Pre-19th century, when more work happened at home, more women participated. Seen that way, the remote work of the COVID-19 era is not an “ aberration” as some chief executives have labeled it, but a regression toward the mean.
Other research by Goldin has found that women’s wages have increased when the work is redesigned to offer both flexibility and substitutability. Her classic example is pharmacists. Back when more pharmacies were independent, the pharmacist had to always be on call and most pharmacists were men, but the rise of chain drug stores meant that pharmacists could work in shifts, subbing in for each other as needed. The result is that today, pharmacists have one of the smallest gender-wage gaps among high-earning fields. It is also a field that is now majority female.
Given that so many jobs have long denied workers both substitutability and flexibility, couples have had to make difficult decisions. Here, Goldin has shown that it is usually wives who are willing to sacrifice their careers for their husbands’ jobs. The reverse is not often true.
“We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity,” she told the New York Times.
That is among the reasons I and so many other writers keep coming back to the gender gap in household labor and caregiving. There are many ways that work can shift around a child’s schedule, and not nearly so many ways that a child can shift around a work schedule.
As Goldin told the Harvard Business Review Women at Work podcast in 2021, the highest-paying jobs today tend to be time-greedy; they require work on evenings and weekends, often on an unpredictable schedule.
In such jobs, “doubling the number of hours more than doubles the earnings,” and often leads to even larger deferred earnings — “you make partner, you get tenure, you get that important first promotion.”
Many time-greedy jobs are still dominated by men, often enabled by wives who handle the home front, but Goldin argued that managerial innovation could allow workers to substitute for each other to make these jobs more mother-friendly.
“The firm, given the incentives, can always find a way to have good substitutes,” she said.
The problem is that so many senior executives simply do not see it that way.
That has become depressingly clear this year, with so many leaders wresting back the flexibility that so many people, and working mothers in particular, have come to rely on to preserve our earning power (not to mention our sanity).
Who knows why the Nobel Committee awards these prizes when they do. Goldin’s work was worthy long before this year, but there is perhaps no better time to recognize her body of work than now.
Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and editor. Previously, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS