“Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity” by Claudia Goldin

Key Themes of the Book:

1. Balancing Career and Family: The book explores how women, particularly college graduates, have navigated the challenges of pursuing both careers and family responsibility over the last century.
2. Gender Pay Gap: Goldin examines how the wage gap between men and women has evolved and why it persists, emphasizing that factors beyond overt discrimination—such as work structure—contribute to inequality.
3. Greedy Work: The concept that certain demanding professions are “greedy” for time, which disproportionately impacts women’s career progression when they have family responsibilities.
4. Generational Shifts: The journey of women across five generations is tracked, highlighting shifts in marriage, career, family aspirations, and societal expectations.
5. Policy and Structural Change: The book addresses the need for workplace reforms to create equity in career progression and family care responsibilities.

Passing the Baton

This important book builds on Claudia Goldin’s decades of research on gender differences in earnings, labor force participation, and education. To understand how opportunities for college-educated American women have changed, Goldin divides these women into five groups. She presents a comprehensive view of the life options of college-educated women in the United States born between 1878 and 1978, showing how their ability to achieve the dual goal of family (having or adopting children) and a career (long-term employment with good pay) shifted across the 20th and 21st centuries. She then uses this historical analysis to examine the causes of the persistent gender pay gap and couple inequity.

Gambar 1.1 A Century of Five Groups of College Graduate Women

A Fork  in the Road

For much of the 20th century, many women had to forgo one goal to pursue the other. The birth control pill, introduced in the 1960s, was a turning point, enabling women to delay marriage and children and focus on their education and career first. However, Goldin notes that this shift created new challenges, as delaying the start of a family sometimes led to difficulties in achieving both goals later in life.

The Bridge Group

The “Bridge Group” refers to a cohort of women who began to transition from prioritizing family to attempting both family and career. These women, often from the mid-20th century, still faced significant societal barriers, such as the expectation that mothers should stay at home while raising children. Policies such as marriage and pregnancy bars persisted, further limiting their career potential. This group made strides toward combining work and family, but at a significant personal cost, as they often had to sacrifice career progress for family.

Gambar 1.2 Marriage and Children among All and Notable College-Graduate Women

At the Crossroads with Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had a significant impact, which resonated with many women in the 1960s who felt stifled by their domestic roles. During this period, formal barriers to women’s employment, such as exclusion from professional schools, began to fall. However, informal societal expectations continued to pressured women to choose between career and motherhood, particularly when children were young. Friedan’s work helped women start rethinking these roles, but achieving true balance remained a distant goal.

The Quiet Revolution

The “quiet revolution” refers to the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, when women began entering college and the professional workforce in record numbers. With greater access to education and professional degrees, women started delaying marriage and children to focus on establishing careers. More women than ever before were earning degrees in fields such as law, medicine, business, and academia. This revolution was considered “quiet” because it happened gradually, but it marked a significant shift in how women approached their careers and family lives.

Gambar 1.3 Occupations of College-Graduate Women, 30 to 34 Years Old: 1940 to 2017

Assisting the Revolution

This chapter delves into the policy and societal changes that began to support women in their pursuit of both career and family. Maternity leave, parental leave, and access to childcare were among the policies that began to be implemented to help women balance these two spheres. However, Goldin notes that these policies were often limited in scope and availability, meaning that many women continued to face significant barriers to achieving career and family success. Workplace flexibility became more common, but structural inequalities persisted, particularly in how work was valued and rewarded. While these reforms represented progress, they were not sufficient to eliminate the gender gap in the workforce.

Gambar 1.4  Career and Family by Advanced Degree, Harvard and Beyond

Mind the Gap

Goldin takes a deeper look at the gender wage gap, pointing out that much of the wage gap is not due to outright discrimination but rather to the structure of work itself. Greedy jobs—those that require long hours, unpredictable schedules, and total availability—are often the highest-paid and most prestigious. Men are more likely to take these jobs because women, due to family responsibilities, need more flexibility. Even within the same professions, men outearn women because they are more likely to take on these high-paying, demanding roles. Goldin argues that until the structure of work changes to offer more flexibility without penalizing workers, the wage gap will persist.

Gambar 1.5 Gender Earnings Ratio for College Graduates by Occupational Sector

The Case of the Lawyer and the Pharmacist

In this case study, Goldin compares two professions—law and pharmacy—to illustrate how work structure affects the ability of women to balance career and family. Pharmacy, a profession with more predictable hours and greater flexibility, allows women to achieve a better balance between work and home life compared to law, a demanding and unpredictable profession. As a result, women in pharmacy experience a  smaller gender pay gap and more opportunities for advancement than women in law. Goldin uses this comparison to argue that restructuring other professions to be more flexible and less greedy could significantly improve women’s ability to balance career and family without sacrificing one for the other.

On Call

In this chapter, Goldin focuses on professions that require being “on-call,” such as law, medicine, and finance. These jobs are often the most lucrative but also the most demanding, requiring workers to be available at all times. For women with caregiving responsibilities, these jobs are especially difficult to manage. Goldin explains how women in these professions often face a choice between scaling back their careers to accommodate family or opting out of these fields entirely. This dynamic leads to a widening pay gap between men and women, particularly after the birth of a child.

Conclusion
In this deeply researched, engagingly written, and surprisingly personal book, Goldin summarizes the history and current state of gender disparities in employment and pay, both in general and specifically for college-educated women. For much of the twentieth century, the pay gap between women and men reflected discrimination, the consequences of marriage, differences in educational attainment, and occupational choices. Today, by contrast, those obstacles to gender parity have been reduced, and the pay gap reflects other causes, including how childbirth and child-rearing interrupt female labor-force participation. More importantly, it reflects how women tend to choose employers and career paths that allow for flexibility and do not require overtime hours and erratic work schedules. This, in turn, allows their spouses to pursue better-compensated positions, further accentuating the gap in “couple equity.” Addressing this problem will require firms to make flexible and part-time work more productive and better-remunerated and governments to provide more generous childcare. More fundamentally, redressing the pay gap will require revisiting the social norm that women are primarily responsible for child-rearing.

REFERENCES

 Almudena Sevilla & Marina Della Giusta (2023) Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, Feminist Economics, 29:1, 301-305, DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2022.2108550

Folbre, Nancy. “Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity – EH.net.” Economic History Association, 2 January 2022, https://eh.net/book_reviews/career-and-family-womens-century-long-journey-toward-equity/ . Accessed 7 November 2024.

Goldin, C. (2021). Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691226736/career-and-family-pdf?srsltid=AfmBOopJinftwjU0m0kLzozawqaSQK_GRxK3lEBlGsOL8k7neschnb_s

Sevilla, A., & Giusta, M. D. (2023). Almudena Sevilla & Marina Della Giusta (2023) Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. Feminist Economics, 2-4.