Opinion
The challenges of American and Indian women from a Goldin lens
Summary
Women in both countries suffer similarly as their capitalist models pit the labour market against the desire to have a family
Recognition for Claudia Goldin’s work may have come late but for several reasons it might be all the sweeter. She is the only woman in Economics to have won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences on her own. Goldin’s body of work has already had a major impact on several key gender equality issues, such as women’s education, participation in the labour force, gender wage gaps and discrimination in hiring. I first came across her work while researching the son preference in India, and in particular how women’s withdrawal from the labour force lowers their value (and that of their daughters) in society. Goldin’s U-shaped curve made eminent sense in the Indian context where poorer women work out of necessity and exit the labour force when household income rises. Where women are better educated, they rejoin the labour force if they have the skills for “respectable jobs". Sometimes this doesn’t go as expected—a subject for another discussion.
Goldin is one of only two Economics Nobel laureates who have received the prize for their work on the family. Gary Becker, who received it in 1992, in part for his path-breaking book, A Treatise on the Family, was an advisor to Goldin. However, their approaches to understanding the family (and, by definition, gender) are somewhat different. Becker brought a rational choice approach to understand household resource allocation and decision-making in marriage, family and fertility. In contrast to Becker’s abstract utility-maximizing individual, Goldin provides nuanced explanations of the shifts in women’s labour force participation by placing their aspirations and decision-making in changing socio-historical contexts at the forefront.
Thus, in her seminal work on career and family, Goldin studied several cohorts of college-educated women who made decisions to prioritise either career or family within the structural constraints of their time. It is only among the last cohort she examines—women who graduated between 1980-1990—that Goldin finds women able to express the confidence to have it all—career as well as family—without sacrificing either. Goldin does not use the word “agency", but it is what she alludes to in talking of a quiet “revolution" replacing “evolution"; college educated women consciously strategizing and negotiating to avoid marriage and motherhood penalties while pursuing careers.
How are highly educated Indian women placed in comparison? I draw insights from my current research on Indian women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to contrast the two. These highly educated women (often more talented than their male counterparts or partners) fail to progress in their careers at levels equivalent to their male colleagues, often dropping out of the labour force due to challenges posed by marriage, motherhood and unshared responsibilities of care work that they are expected to juggle along with work.
A Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) report in 2022 reiterates how marriage, care work and gender biases in hiring set women back. Almost 41% of the women students surveyed had to change their place/city of work after marriage, becoming trailing wives. They get consigned to sub-par careers as the career of the husband, the socially designated “bread-winner," is prioritised. Nearly 78% of female S&T (science and technology) staff of CSIR and 55% of AcSIR (Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research) female students were required to take care of their parents, in-laws, or siblings. Further, overt forms of discrimination still persist—female doctorates of marriageable age faced greater difficulty in getting a job, male candidates being preferred, and candidates who were mothers were routinely rejected.
Goldin’s findings regarding highly qualified professional women—she focuses on MBAs and JDs—lawyers—dropping out or reducing work hours are reiterated by scholars studying American scientists. William and Ceci in their article, ‘When Scientists Choose Motherhood’, document studies which reveal that while married men with children are rewarded, women get penalized; research cited demonstrates that more the number of children men have, the more time they spend per week on their careers while the opposite is observed for women! A woman choosing to forgo marriage/children has the same career path as a man with or without children, while a woman with children suffers much-delayed career progression or exits from work. Fewer men prefer temporary or permanent part-time careers to accommodate family life. As Goldin remarks, “greedy" organizations favour men who can respond to demanding work cultures. Women on the other hand, are buffeted both by greedy organizations and greedy families. And their unpaid labour in the family facilitates men’s career progression, while derailing their own.
In contrast with American women, how do Indian female scientists with career and family aspirations survive in the STEM workforce? Here, the spirit if not the facticity of the famed Indian joint family comes to the rescue. We could characterize this family form as the “intermittent joint family" that materializes as and when needed. For STEM women to do their PhDs, get married, have children and pursue unbroken careers, it is parents (mothers?) on both sides who arrive to provide the much-needed support. Many STEM (and non-STEM) couples today are what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls LAT (Living Apart Together) couples. Married with children and working in science labs in different cities, they survive because of parental support. While this highlights the admirable doggedness of the women to pursue careers and have families, it surely comes at a personal and familial cost. Two-body hiring is thus a necessary intervention whose time has come to prevent qualified women from dropping out of careers and making life more manageable for such couples. However, this solution to a modern-day conundrum should not end up reproducing a hierarchy where the wife with similar qualifications is consigned to a less prestigious and often temporary position that leads nowhere.
A crucial difference while comparing Indian and American women is that Indian women can still choose to be absent from the labour force by accepting the role of dependent wives. This is not a choice for the majority of American women. With the rise of modernity and associated individualization, as Beck argues, not only men but women also are forced to pursue independent careers and move where the jobs are. The logic of capitalism, which prioritizes efficiency and profit-making, necessarily creates a contradiction between the labour market and people’s aspirations to marry and have a family. The market model of modernity essentially implies a society without families and children with the ideal figure of capitalism being the fully mobile single person.
How then should the modern workplace accommodate the career plus family aspirations of couples? While social modernization works slowly to break barriers to women’s advancement, institutions and workplaces must respond through changes in policies and institutional culture that support a better work-life balance for both women and men. This in essence is also Goldin’s advice to organizations.
