The Cost of Couple Equity
Claudia Goldin's 'Career and Family'
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics. In Career & Family : Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity (2021), she presents her research on the earnings gap between men and women to a lay audience.
Summary
Her central claim is that the earnings gap results from “couple inequity”, which in turn is caused by “greedy work”.
Employers award the highest salaries and the best opportunities for advancement to employees who place themselves completely at their employer’s disposal, with no limits on hours or availability (“greedy work”). But such employment is incompatible with parental responsibilities, so in two-career families, at least one partner must seek a more flexible position with fewer hours. The partner in the more flexible position, who does most of the caregiving and housework, will earn less and will advance more slowly, hence “couple inequity”. This is usually the woman in a heterosexual union, which Goldin blames on gender norms, but the problem applies to same-sex couples also. If both partners seek positions compatible with caregiving, their union may be more equitable, but then both partners will harm their careers, and Goldin’s data shows that the loss to their combined earnings will not be linearly proportionate to their reduced hours in the workplace; the couple will lose much more.
After framing the problem, Goldin presents a historical overview. She narrows her focus to American women who went to college (especially elite colleges) and divides them into five generational groups or cohorts.
Goldin has grouped the generations based on how the women of each cohort typically responded to the demands of career and family under the conditions of their day. Family here means at least one child, possibly adopted, but “not necessarily a spouse”. Goldin distinguishes a career from a job: a career is “long-lasting, sought-after employment [that] often shapes one’s identity”, while a job is basically just a source of income (p20).
Goldin spends a chapter on each of these groups describing those typical responses and mentioning prominent women from each group, along with data to support her claims and notes on methods and sources.
The women of Group 1, who graduated from college between 1900 and 1919, found it very hard to have both a career and a family, and chose one or the other (again, these are typical responses; there are exceptions in every cohort).
Group 2 worked at jobs for a few years after graduation until they married. Laws and employment practices kept married women out of many workplaces, including schools, and the Great Depression made it harder for everyone to find work, especially women.
Group 3 married and had children relatively early, and got jobs (not careers) when their children were older.
Group 4 began careers and put off starting families, enabled by new contraceptive technologies. Unfortunately, these women were unaware of how limited their fertile years were, and many were unable to conceive when they were ready to do so.
Group 5 was the first for whom pursuing a career and having a family simultaneously was a realistic option. Advances in reproductive technology have given them more flexibility than group 4 had. But the earnings gap persists.
Where does the gap come from? Goldin shows that overt gender discrimination and occupational segregation may contribute to the gender gap in earnings, but they are relatively minor factors. The gap is much smaller between men and women early in their careers, and it is also much smaller between men and women without families. The gap is greatest between men with children and women with children.
The gap mainly results from the choices parents make in response to the demands of the workplace. “Greedy work” forces families to choose between equity and financial security. A contributing factor is “up or out” promotional policies, like those of tenure-track academics, meaning that those who do not achieve promotions within a certain time lose their positions. “Up-or-out” policies require intense commitment from new entrants to the field, which put those with parental responsibilities at a competitive disadvantage. “Greedy work” and the up-or-out promotion system of many so-called professional positions penalize those who make time for caregiving and domestic responsibilities. Couples with dependents can’t afford to incur this penalty twice, so one partner stays on the fast track at work while the other partner becomes the primary caregiver. More often than not, the primary caregiver is the woman, which Goldin attributes to gender norms.
Must it be so? Goldin compares law and pharmacy to show that it need not. The gender earnings gap is worse in law than in pharmacy; in fact, the gap in pharmacy is among the smallest of any profession. The reason is because of the different structure of the workplaces.
The most lucrative positions in law require long hours and 24/7 availability. In order to eventually make partner, newly hired lawyers must show that they can meet these demands; many of these positions are up or out. Self-employment can be just as demanding.
Decades ago, pharmacy was similar to law in terms of time demands, but pharmacy, along with most of the US healthcare system, has changed. Pharmacy has largely been taken over by big corporations, and technology and bureaucracy have standardized much of its practices. The training of pharmacists is no less rigorous than that of lawyers, but pharmacists are now largely interchangeable in ways that lawyers are not. There is no need for a particular pharmacist to be on call to serve particular clients. There is no premium for working long hours; the relationship between hours worked and pay is linear. Goldin observes similar trends in certain other healthcare professions (but not all).
Goldin offers three solutions to reduce the gender gap in earnings:
One solution is to reduce the cost of flexibility. Cheapen the tradeoff. Make it so that couples don’t have to face as difficult a compromise. If the greedy job does not pay as much for on-call, weekend, long-hours work, then Lukas [the husband in one of Goldin’s examples, see figure 1.1, above] would be less enticed to take it. Better yet, make the flexible job more productive, and have it pay more. Then Lukas would gladly switch from the greedy to the flexible job. And Isabel [the wife] would earn more in the flexible position and be less likely to leave her job entirely. The family will be slightly poorer in terms of their income, but they will be monumentally richer in terms of couple equity. Both parents would be able to spend the right amount of time with the children without impoverishing the family. The two lines in figure 1.1 would come closer together, as would the metaphorical people being represented.
A complementary solution is to lessen the cost of childcare for the parents. With more accessible care, the tradeoffs are less costly. Most other rich nations greatly subsidize childcare, spending three to four times the US level relative to their national income. Nations as diverse as France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom heavily fund childcare that is high quality. This is one reason why the labor force participation rate for prime-age women in those nations now exceeds that in the US, even though the US rate had exceeded theirs for most of the post-WWII years. And care issues do not stop with regular school hours. They also concern after-school and summer programs for the K–12 group. A separate set of policies addresses the care of parents, grandparents, and others.
Yet another solution is to alter societal norms, so that tradeoffs do not depend on gender. As I have noted before in the context of same-sex couples, that might serve to greater equalize economic outcomes by gender but would not fix the problem of couple equity. It would not enable both members of the couple to be at their respective bliss points. (pp. 218-219)
Evaluation
I read this book hoping that it would support my project for reducing working hours (see 1200 Hours (working draft)). I was not disappointed. That is, I believe Goldin’s data supports my contention that the way work is currently structured is detrimental and unfair to working families. It is less clear whether Goldin would support the specific measures I have proposed, and it seems that Goldin views the problem mainly through the lens of gender, while I view it mainly through the lens of class. I agree with her that “greedy work” in some sense is the main problem.
Concerning Goldin’s three solutions — increase flexibility, lessen the cost of childcare, and alter societal norms — I agree with the first two but have misgivings about the third.
It is unclear how Goldin wants to go about increasing flexibility. Goldin does not offer any specific regulatory responses (I discuss concrete proposals in “1200 Hours”, linked above). Her discussion of the healthcare professions seems to suggest that she might be content to let employers evolve without government regulation. But the productivity of American workers has been increasing for decades without reducing workers’ hours or increasing their pay proportionately, so I don’t see why she thinks this will solve the problem.
Goldin briefly mentions childcare subsidies [edit: she discusses it further in her epilogue, where she talks about the Lanham Act and federally funded daycare during WW2]. Perhaps not much more needs to be said. The problem of affordable childcare is widely recognized. In the wake of proposals for universal pre-K for children aged 3-4, which I support, I will voice a concern about childcare for younger ages. Instead of providing subsidized childcare for children below age 2, it should be possible for at least one parent to stay home and care for them, and prevailing wages, employment practices (including parental leave), or the social safety net should make that feasible.
As for changing social norms, well, pregnancy is not a social norm. Men and women are different, and even in a technologically advanced society, they are not completely interchangeable. And why would we want them to be? I don’t see any value in promoting some ideological ideal of androgyny.
The writing and editing is impressive. With some data and two or three biographical examples per chapter, Goldin is able to paint an evocative picture of the struggles, setbacks, and triumphs of women over the course of a century.
Goldin’s work is a relief from the sanctimonious discourse in which this topic is often couched. While Goldin blames gender norms for the gender gap in earnings insofar as it is usually women who sacrifice their career progress in order to take on a larger share of domestic responsibilities, she does not descend to misandrist rhetoric, and she acknowledges in her limited way that men are sacrificing something too when they give up time with their families in order to stay on track at work.
Yet Goldin’s book exemplifies the shortcomings of liberal feminism. She avoids the worst excesses of feminism, but she exemplifies the some of the worst excesses of liberalism — its extreme individualism and its tendency to default to the market as the final arbiter of value (q.v. my post, Contrasts between Aristotelianism and Liberalism).
The classism of liberal feminism is undisguised in Goldin’s work. It’s not that liberal feminists don’t care about the plight of non-white women or the working class, but for thinkers like Goldin, the college-educated white woman is evidently the measure of all things.
I will give the last word to a feminist, Prof. Sarah F. Small, who, in her mostly laudatory review of this book (pdf) in Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics, writes:
Goldin’s book includes very little discussion about low-income women, immigrant women, and women of color, despite the fact that many such groups are overrepresented in the market care infrastructure which have allowed so many college-educated White women to balance their career and family (Ferguson 2017). Ultimately, because the book discusses many of the other mechanisms which allowed college-educated women to hold both careers and families, I think the book would have benefitted [sic] from a more nuanced discussion of care infrastructures and their evolution across Goldin’s five cohorts, perhaps pulling from some of Rose’s (1999) work or discussion of global care chains (Ferguson 2017). In many ways, Goldin’s book felt like it was targeted as a guidebook to women like me: White women who are beginning their careers after completing several years of higher education in the United States and are starting to ask questions about family formation. Indeed, one well-written and concise source for many of our questions about the policies and cultural shifts which allowed college-educated women to reach today’s point is useful. Still, additional acknowledgement and a deeper consideration of how college-educated women have attained a balance of work and family off the backs of less privileged women would have made the book even more useful.
Many higher-income, college-educated women benefit from keeping the price of outsourced domestic services low and, in turn, keeping the wages of domestic workers low and their positions precarious. This dynamic can lead to discrimination toward domestic workers and to ambivalence about the rights of women commonly employed in domestic service and care work. Goldin provides a limited analysis of this fact, which I found concerning. As women of my generation and education status begin to balance career and family, we cannot in good conscious [sic] continue to focus solely on our own successes at the expense of other women. When readers consider the future of career and family that Goldin asks us to consider, I hope they keep the exploitation of women without college degrees at the forefront of their minds, even if not prompted by the text.