Abstract
One of the most hotly contested, enduring debates among social scientists centers on the question, why is there (still) a gender-based pay gap? In Career and Family, Claudia Goldin, a preeminent economic historian and labor economist, downplays the relative importance of some answers commonly given to this question: discrimination, women’s lack of assertiveness, and occupational segregation. Instead, she identifies the primary culprit today in the U.S. as the structure of work and compensation, noting, “If we want to eradicate or even narrow the pay gap, we must first . . . give the problem a more accurate name: greedy work” (p. 3). A fuller, albeit less catchy, label for the problem as she identifies it is the spread of overwork in high-paying occupations in conjunction with women’s continuing primary role in managing households.
The book has two distinct segments, the first presenting a cohort-based analysis of women’s patterns of labor force participation over the last 150 years, and the second addressing the sources of the contemporary pay gap. The first segment provides a useful context for the second segment, but these could also be read independently and may appeal to different sets of readers. The first part is particularly relevant to those interested in studying sources of change in the gender composition of the U.S. labor force. In separate chapters, Goldin depicts a succession of cohort-based solutions adopted by college-educated women (the set who presumably would be most likely to aspire to long-term, higher-status careers) to the problem of managing competing demands of career and family roles. The first strategy, dubbed “family
For those of us who believe in the virtues of understanding the present from an evolutionary vantage point, Goldin’s cohort analysis is engaging and provocative. Her analyses of changes across cohorts integrate some of her previous work on institutional forces that have shaped women’s decisions about employment, including the enforcement of marriage bars (laws prohibiting the employment of married women) during the Depression years and the advent of the birth control pill in the mid-twentieth century. Readers interested in the history of women and work in the U.S. might wish for some elaboration of these sorts of institutional forces. For example, a discussion of the potential legacy of coverture—state laws common through the mid- to late-nineteenth century that gave husbands complete control of wives’ property, including earnings—might help make sense of the first cohort’s propensity to choose family
While gender-based earnings differences have clearly narrowed over time, they are still far from negligible. The pay gap currently stands at about 80 percent (that is, full-time women workers earn, on average, four-fifths of what similarly employed men earn). Moreover, this disparity has become more pronounced since the 1990s among workers with a college education, dropping to about 73 percent in this group. Women’s rate of labor force participation has risen markedly over time, as have their investments in higher education (now exceeding those of men) and their rates of entry into many well-paying occupations in which they were historically underrepresented. Discrimination on the basis of sex has been legally prohibited for nearly 75 years. So why do women, especially college-educated women, still earn less than men?
Goldin’s answer to this question provides an important viewpoint for scholars in various disciplines who want to understand and reduce contemporary gender inequality. This segment of the book shows a clearer affinity with neoclassical economics than do her cohort analyses. The core of her explanation runs something like this: in certain high-paying occupations, like law, management, and finance, employers today prefer workers who are willing to put in very long hours—often well above 50 hours per week—and they are willing to pay a premium for such workers. Employers’ preferences for such workers are driven, it seems, mainly by clients’ preferences for closer ties to highly responsive, always-on-call individuals. While women in these occupations also often work long hours, doing so is difficult because the onus for family care still typically falls on them. In consequence, over time, women are more likely to reduce their work hours, either working for employers that do not demand such long hours or leaving the workforce entirely. Goldin argues that “choice, rather than paternalism or bias, is the major factor” in these job changes (p. 166). As one piece of evidence for this claim, she describes a study of MBA recipients indicating that women whose husbands earn above the median salary of men with MBA degrees have larger reductions in hours worked and the greatest likelihood of leaving the workforce. The wage premium paid to those who work extra-long hours, she suggests, makes this specialization in work and family by members of a couple a rational choice. (There is an elephant in the room here—why household work remains so markedly gendered today—but that is a question with no generally accepted answer.)
Goldin’s observations about the trend toward overwork among a subset of the workforce and the consequences of this trend for the gender pay gap are consistent with those of others. Jacobs and Gerson (2004) have documented this change and a corresponding shift toward increased underemployment (30 hours/week or less) in another subset of the workforce. And a study by Cha and Weeden (2014) using data from 1997–2009 shows a fairly stable gender gap in the rates of overwork among men and women (with men being more than twice as likely as women to be in this group), as well as a growing hourly wage premium awarded to those working long hours. Goldin’s explanation of these changes as driven by increases in productivity and employers’ response to client demands differentiates her work from these previous studies.
Given this analysis, how is it possible to decrease the wage gap? A neoclassical economics framework, with its inherent leave-the-market-alone tilt, does not seem to provide much footing for addressing this question. Goldin suggests that “getting men on board with childcare today is a critical part of the solution” (p. 232) and cites Douglas Emhoff (spouse of Vice President Kamala Harris) as a good role model for contemporary men. But if greedy work is key to the problem and economic inducements make it rational for men (especially if they have wives who will assume the lion’s share of household labor) to conform to this greediness, that does not seem a viable solution.
The analysis by Jacobs and Gerson (2004) points to another reason for the rise of overwork patterns besides client or employer preferences for ever-on-call workers: avoiding expensive outlays for worker benefits by hiring fewer employees who work longer hours (and hiring more workers into positions that do not legally require benefits). In this context, one solution could be to require overtime pay for all occupational groups, those now classified as exempt as well as non-exempt. This solution may have its own limits, but it is consistent with economists’ general policy approach of ensuring that decision makers bear the costs of economic choices (including those made by corporate actors). Corporations have externalized implicit costs of labor to women and families for far too long.