Career and Family
Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvard economics professor Goldin (Women Working Longer) examines the obstacles that prevent women from "having it all" in this clear-eyed and evidence-based study. Disputing the idea that women need to "lean in" to advance their careers, Goldin draws on employment surveys, census records, and other large data sets to show that because women are expected to bear the brunt of child-rearing duties, they don't have time for the extensive travel, client entertainment, and 60-hour workweeks that lead to career success in fields such as law and accounting. As a result of working fewer hours than men in order to have enough time for childcare, women tend to miss out on promotions and earn less, on average, than their male peers. Goldin refers to the phenomenon as "greedy work" and cites the example of the pharmacy industry, where there is virtually no pay gap between male and female pharmacists and few incentives for pharmacists to work extra hours, as proof that requirement doesn't need to exist, even within high-paying professions. Combining diligent research with acute observations, accessible case studies, and practical solutions, this is a refreshing take on a pernicious social problem.
