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Goldin’s Nobel: Flexible work matters enormously to women
- Her work was worthy long ago but covid created a new context
When I saw the news that Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin had won the Nobel Prize for 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 grey 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, day-care 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 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’s an especially apt time to recognize Goldin’s work. In the US, a post-pandemic rebound in women’s workforce participation rate has narrowed this gender gap to the smallest on record. This has come as a pleasant surprise after a steep decline in 2020, when America’s female-dominated service sector was hit by covid. Women’s workforce resilience can be attributed in part to a strong economy (despite recession fears), schools and day cares re-opening, and rising wages (which compensate for high day-care costs). Also important: The greater flexibility offered by employers in 2022 and 2023. Women have always needed 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 shown how flexibility matters to mothers’ earning power. She has studied women’s labour on an epic scale—scanning decades of history. She has also zoomed in 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 era is not an aberration, 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, pharmacists had to be on call and most were men. But the rise of chain drug stores meant that pharmacists could work in shifts, subbing in for each other as needed. Today, pharmacists have one of the smallest gender-wage gaps among high-earning fields [in the US]. It’s also a field that’s majority female.
Given that so many jobs have long denied workers substitutability and flexibility, couples have had to make difficult decisions. Here, Goldin has shown that it’s usually wives who 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 once said. That’s among the reasons I and so many other writers keep coming back to the gender gap in household labour and caregiving. There are many ways that work can shift around a child’s schedule, but few for a child’s needs to adapt to a work schedule.
And as Goldin told a Harvard Business Review 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 dominated by men, often enabled by wives who handle the home front. But, Goldin argued, 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.” The problem is that so many senior executives simply don’t see it that way. That has become depressingly clear this year, with 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 research work was worthy long before 2023. But then, there is perhaps no better time to recognize her body of work than right now. ©bloomberg
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First Published:10 Oct 2023, 05:12 PM IST
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