Navigating the demands placed on women by both workplace and family has never been easy. Now, award-winning research is showing how generations of women have tried to balance these expectations in differing ways yet with an enduring result that’s impacted career trajectories and pay.
Dr. Claudia Goldin—Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University—is now the third woman in history to win the Nobel prize for economics (and the first to win it for solo work), based on her groundbreaking research into the history of women in the workforce. Her findings shed new light on the causes for the persistent gaps in labor participation and wages between the genders and could suggest changes for the future of work.
Goldin admits she never set out to study women working. Her research always began, she says, when “you crave answers to the questions you pose.” That approach led Goldin in many different directions in her years as an historic economist. What finally began nagging at her, though, was how little she understood about the work life of the family member who typically undergoes the biggest transitions over time—the wife and mother.
“I neglected women because the sources had,” Goldin has said. “Women were in the data when young and single and often when widowed. But their stories were faintly heard after they married and they weren’t often producing goods and services in sectors that were, or would be, part of the GNP.”
Correcting the record meant digging through 200 years of records at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and other sources to collect, correlate, and update the data. The task spanned vast changes in American history. In its early years, the U.S. economy was largely agrarian. Women tended to work alongside their husbands running the family farm or business. That changed as the U.S. transitioned into an industrial economy toward the end of the nineteenth century. Traditionally, economists have equated economic growth with workforce growth. Goldin discovered that, while such might hold true for men, it was far less clear what happened to women. Laboriously cross-referencing old census records (which tended to list a married woman’s occupation simply as “wife”) with industrial sources, Goldin gradually created a more accurate, robust, and complete database that revealed the U.S. workforce at the close of the 19th century to be larger and more diverse than previously thought.
Then Goldin’s research showed something more: With the transition from a predominately agrarian to industrial economy in the U.S., women tended to drop out of the labor market. Going to work suddenly meant leaving home, as opposed to helping run the family farm or a cottage industry. When it did, women chose to stop working: It was simply too hard to blend work and family. By the first decades of the 20th century, then, only about 5% of women were participating in the workforce in paid employment. In other words, the research suggests, if you want to equalize opportunities for men and women, don’t count on economic growth alone. What also matters are societal expectations—especially if a woman is married and has children.
In 2010, Goldin co-authored a paper with Leonard Katz (also of Harvard) describing the career and pay trajectories of graduates from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Within a decade of earning their MBA, they wrote, women trained to do the same work were earning 50 percent less than their male classmates. The precipitating factor appeared to be the birth of a woman’s first child.
“We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity,” Goldin has noted. Rather than blaming biology or discrimination, the crucial factor appears to be the extra unpaid labor women typically shoulder as primary caregivers in heterosexual couples. A working mother is likelier to pick a career path that requires fewer hours at the office, or grants a more flexible schedule, in order to balance work and childrearing. Male partners, by contrast, can and are more willing to be available as many hours as employers may demand in order to succeed.
The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 started a rapid increase in women’s workplace participation. For the first time, women had more control over when and how many children they had. The ensuing decades saw the percentage of married women engaged in paid employment rise 70% from its low of 5% earlier in the century. Young women today also outpace young men in seeking and completing higher education.
Although her findings have written a new story about women at work, Goldin doesn’t consider herself a pioneer, she says, or even particularly advocate for women. Rather, she has said, “Questions led to answers; answers led to more questions” and “I became consumed by the history of women in the workplace.”
Whatever her inspiration, Goldin’s work has legitimized research into the economics of gender at a new level and spurred others to deepen the inquiries she opened. With about half of all women around the world now in paid employment, the implications of Goldin’s research could reach far. Women in most developed countries continue to earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. And, while the gender gap in pay has eased in recent decades, it persists.
To erase it completely, Goldin’s research suggests, won’t just require equal pay for equal work, but also perhaps rethinking societal and family norms.
“I knew when I started that this would be a story of importance,” Goldin has said. “And I also knew that I was the one to do it.”