Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity
Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics
A renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home
A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.
Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed--and the barriers they faced--in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining.
Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.
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Community Reviews
At this point, you might assume the author wrote a polemic. She did not. The book rather provides a coherent economic argument and history the fate of college educated women over the past century. If there is a claim in here that lies unsupported, I didn’t notice it. Goldin provides a raft of data from a surprising variety of sources and creates natural experiments with historically available data that provide convincing support to her claims.
She also does remarkable history. She lays bare just how new this notion of full mother and full career are - around the 70s and coincident with the pill. She shows generation by generation how the expectations of women shifted - sometimes as a result of the prior generations experience, sometimes due to broader social shifts. But she always keeps her ear tuned to the feeling of being a college educated woman and the distance felt at each time from the sort of full human experience she clearly believes out to be the end point of this story.
Finally she convincingly explains how our current institutions work and what needs to change for women to truly feel themselves to have finally achieved the equality that they obviously deserve. She explains our institutions must change, flexible work must be more normal and available. She also feels the next steps cannot be only the concern of women. Her words:
“We need men to lean out at work, support their male colleagues who are in parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways by letting them know that their families are worth even more than their jobs. Aspirations won’t be realized unless men are brought along for the rest of the journey.”
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