Claudia Goldin: Explorer of the Gender Gap

WE ALL KNOW women’s participation in the workforce has in­creased over the years, but has this always been a uniform growth? Did the move from agrarian to industrial societies, for instance, lead to more working women? Does economic development always lead to a more level-playing field? What explains the wage gap? Is it merely a discrimina­tory workplace, or does it also have something to do with the nature of our jobs? And what of motherhood and the responsibilities placed upon women at the house; how do these affect her role in the job market?

These are thorny questions, and for economists, difficult to answer. Claudia Goldin however has been at the centre of this enquiry about women and the workplace for several decades. A Harvard economist who has sometimes been compared to a detective for her ability to dig through historical archives to answer such big questions credibly, Goldin was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Only the third woman to win an economics Nobel, and the first to win without sharing it, Goldin was awarded the prize, according to the citation, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”

Although the focus of her work is primarily on the US labour market, its insights also help us understand what is going on elsewhere. And it is possible to look at her various papers over the years to get a comprehensive history of the way gender roles have shaped and operated in the workplace over the last two centuries. Her work has over the years overturned many assumptions, whether it is about the way gender relations operated in the past to what is needed to bring about more parity in the present day. For instance, far from the popular belief that economic growth and technological advancements pull more women into the workforce, Goldin showed that when the economy in the US moved from agriculture to manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, the number of women actually dropped dramatically from the workforce. She argued that, unlike farming, manufacturing work was harder to do from home, foreshadowing the struggles of balancing work and family life that mothers face today. Women’s participation increased in the 1900s, as the service sector began to expand as a part of the economy.

The biggest boost came in the 1970s, something she calls a “revolutionary” period when women in the US began to marry later, enrolled in higher education, and took up more jobs. In one paper, Goldin and her colleague and husband Lawrence Katz, detailed how the arrival of the contraceptive pill during this period played an important role in boosting college enrolment and job participation by women. In another, she showed how discrimination works when she wrote about how when symphony orchestras went from auditions where musicians could be observed to one where they could be screened, women started to get more coveted positions. As Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan, told Washington Post, Goldin has always seen the richness of people’s lives and their decisions. “The men before her studied work and rarely gave a thought to how the actual food got on the table, clothes on the backs and the children raised,” she said.

What about the wage gap between genders? While this gap has lessened over time, it has been considered slow and sporadic at best. Goldin however does not give in to the popular belief that discriminatory workplaces are necessarily to blame. According to her, it is in fact the result of what she terms “greedy jobs”, or jobs in finance, law and consulting, which pay well but demand long and uncertain hours. Since women are still expected to take on most of the burden of child-rearing, even among couples in these sectors, Goldin argues, that is why a pay gap tends to open up right after the arrival of the first child.

Goldin’s work may be focused on the US market, but their insights could prove valuable, especially to fast-developing countries like India, which has seen huge numbers of women joining the workspace in the last few decades, but not nearly enough.

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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