Podcast Episode 3: Claudia Goldin

Transcript

Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 3 with Claudia Goldin

Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

(Recorded 01/28/2022)

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:06.62] LARRY BOBO: Hello, everyone. My name is Larry Bobo. I am the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University, and this is our third episode of Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo. Our guest is Claudia Goldin this time. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics in the Economics Department and is the author of a major new book from Princeton University Press entitled Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity.

[00:00:37.60] Let me first thank you for taking part in this conversation, Claudia. I often begin on a somewhat more personal note. And in this instance, I think it’s easy to connect that personal note to the subject matter and themes of your book. Career and Family is centrally about the changing and arguably improving position of women, particularly well-educated women who pursue professional careers.

[00:01:05.95] One starting point for me then is to ask you to think back to when your own career at Harvard began. So when was that and how many women faculty were there in the Economics Department when you arrived and how has that landscape changed if we look at it today?

[00:01:24.34] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Yes. Well, I arrived at Harvard 30 years ago. And I remember, when I arrived, The Crimson had a big article about the fact that the Economics Department had tenured its first woman ever. And I arrived here and was asked many, many questions about that, to which I responded what’s interesting is that I was the first woman tenured at three other places or given a tenured position at three other places and no one asked me a single question about it. [CHUCKLING]

[00:02:02.58] So I think that we were, at the time, very consumed with the notion that we should– and it’s a wonderful thing that, 30 years ago, Harvard was consumed by the notion that it should and it was going to be much better for it if it increased the number of women in certain fields and economics was certainly one of them. So, yes, I was the first woman who was tenured in economics at Harvard ever.

[00:02:34.64] But I was also the first at the University of Pennsylvania, at Princeton, and at Caltech. And no one said anything about that. But how things have changed in what I see and what the data certainly reveal is that women who pursue these time-intensive, difficult, with upfront time careers in academia, that a greater fraction of them now go on to have children, either biological or adopted children, and much, much greater than when I was coming up through the ranks.

[00:03:19.85] LARRY BOBO: And so when you started at Harvard– and it’s fascinating to think of you as multiple firsts for different institutions. Were you the only woman faculty member at the time? Were there other untenured or tenure-track women in the department?

[00:03:36.22] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: There were many faculty members here, some of whom received tenure not much after. For example, Caroline Hoxby. Susan Athey also came here not much later. So I’m not going to say that certainly I started a change, but there was a change in the air and something was changing and something actually did change in a very big way.

[00:04:11.38] LARRY BOBO: Beautiful. Your book opens with a discussion of an observation from Betty Friedan. And a moment ago, you mentioned something about the time-intensive nature of these highly-demanding careers, like being a professor at an elite Ivy League institution. And Friedan suggested that college-educated women faced, quote, “a problem with no name.” So what is the problem with no name?

[00:04:40.73] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, there’s the Friedan problem with no name, which certainly existed at the time in that problem with no name. The way in which she put it and the way in which I would put it are a little bit different, but let’s put it one way that we can all agree about. And that problem with no name was that women who were college-educated were sort of stuck at home. And to her, they had limited vision.

[00:05:14.76] In fact, they didn’t have such limited vision. They had more limited vision in her world sort of looking backward than in my world, that I can see sort of they’re looking forward. They sort of all had what I would call “get-out-of-jail-free cards” in the sense that a very large fraction of them had majored in subjects that would lead to a very, very good job, maybe even a career after the kids were sort of safely in school.

[00:05:46.37] My own mother was one of those and became not just a teacher. She became a principal in a public school in the Bronx, and she lived to have a very fulfilling occupation and possibly even a career. But to Friedan, she saw someone like my mother as sort of stuck at home and not having as fulfilling a life.

[00:06:19.07] So that was Friedan’s problem with no name. We have a very different problem with no name now. Our problem with no name, which I will give a name to, is the problem that we have a tension between gender equity and couple equity, that for, when a heterosexual couple has children or any couple, any woman has children, there are huge time demands on her, on anyone with children.

[00:06:55.91] And it means that that conflicts with career time demands. And if careers are extremely greedy, then what’s going to happen is that the individual who spends more time with the caregiving is going to necessarily give up a bit on the career. And let’s talk about heterosexual couples. If, in heterosexual couples, it’s the woman who disproportionately gives up on the time and gives the time for her career and gives more time to the child care, then if jobs are greedier, then it’s going to be the case that she is going to give up more on the career.

[00:07:45.12] And so couple inequity means that we essentially are throwing gender equity under the bus with it, and that’s really the problem. The problem with no name now is that we see that there are huge differences between what educated women earn and can do in the labor market, those with caregiving responsibilities. And the problem with no name then is the fact that there are greedy jobs.

[00:08:18.64] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. Let me focus a bit there on the gender gap issue. We see, for example, at least in the popular high-profile cases of women, say, especially in the entertainment industry, really asserting now a much stronger claim to equal pay as the men who are stars in films or music and the like. And of course, popularly, there’s still great discussion about the gender gap in earnings. Now, setting aside the complexities of precisely defining a gender gap in earnings, what is the current kind of conventionally accepted estimate of the size of the gender gap?

[00:09:02.30] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, the problem is that there isn’t one gender gap, that there are many, many gender gaps. So if we think about a college graduate woman and a college graduate man coming out of college or out of a professional degree program or a graduate degree program and entering the labor market, chances are, when they land their first job, they’re going to be pretty equal.

[00:09:27.38] But over time– and this gets to this notion, the problem with no name, the greedy work issue– that, if they then have kids or have other caregiving responsibilities, one of them is going to step back a bit more. And then the differences between their earnings over time is going to grow and grow. So there isn’t one gender gap. There are gender gaps that change with the age and experience of the individual.

[00:09:56.58] So to say that the gender gap today– and we have computations, and I can tell you what they are. That’s going to be 0.82, so women make on average $0.82 on the dollar. But that is a very, very particular slice of the entire working population. It’s going to be the individuals who are– first of all, it’s computed on weekly earnings. They’re medians for men and women and they’re for full-time year round workers. But in practice, there isn’t one gender gap.

[00:10:34.01] LARRY BOBO: Right. And accepting that but also accepting that it still is an indicator of something that ought to be of concern to us, I take it that part of your thesis or maybe even arguably the core thesis is that we really should be thinking of this, as you said a moment ago, as resulting from the tug between the obligations and duties of family on the one hand and the obligations and duties of work, especially of serious careers on the other. You write, for example, quote, “The gender earnings gap is a result of the career gap. The career gap is the root of couple inequity.” So can we drill in for a little bit on the meaning of the career gap?

[00:11:22.76] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Sure. So let me get back to the notion of greedy work, because I said the words and I didn’t define them. So greedy work can be defined as a job that pays disproportionately more on a per-hour basis when someone works a greater number of hours or has less control over those hours. It can be a rush job, a demanding client who calls at 11:00 PM, a supervisor who asks that the worker give up a vacation day for the project. The firm has deemed that the additional payment is worth it to have the work done over more hours, but the other critical aspect is that the worker has to agree to do it at that wage.

[00:12:05.21] So it’s sort of supply and demand. So the point is that this is sort of a complicated equilibrium in which the compensation may be insufficient reason for some workers, let’s say women, to give up their time or family life. But the compensation may be sufficient for some other workers, let’s say men, to do the same thing. And so under those conditions, women will shift to firms with less demanding hours or leave the workforce altogether.

[00:12:39.84] So for example, two workers, two individuals who graduate from law school, they might both take jobs in this big law firm. That’s a greedy law firm. And then when the kids arrive, one of them realizes, well, we can’t both do this type of job. And so one of them then moves to the boutique law firm that has more cheaper flexibility and the other one stays.

[00:13:13.01] Well, it turns out that, given our norms and traditions, that it’s generally, in heterosexual couples, the man who will stay with the big ticket hire in a law firm and the woman who will move to the boutique law firm and do more of the caregiving. So that’s really the root of the issue of the problem with no name today, which is greedy work. Meaning that, when we give up couple equity, we throw gender equality under the bus as well.

[00:13:49.52] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. So in a way, part of the challenge is, who’s going to be on call at home and who gets to be on call at work? And in that kind of dynamic, would it be fair to kind of supplement the vocabulary you’ve used by saying that families are needy and work in the form of elite careers are greedy? Or is that an unfair parsing of the argument?

[00:14:15.77] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: I actually should have had this conversation with you before I wrote the book, because that’s very, very good. I didn’t use the word “needy,” but “needy” versus “greedy” is absolutely perfect. Thanks very much.

[00:14:29.03] LARRY BOBO: OK. Let me ask, in most of the book and indeed in our discussion so far, you really focus on the college-educated. Can I get you to explain why that choice rather than, say, wrestle with the entirety of women in the labor force?

[00:14:50.69] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, part of it is because I wanted to focus on careers. And college is important to my story, because it was and is a means to having a career. That doesn’t mean that all careers require college. I mean, Mother Teresa probably we would certainly say had an amazing career. And being important in certain ways doesn’t require higher education. But generally, it does.

[00:15:25.91] And it sort of allowed me to limit the population in some manner and not deal with the thousands of other things that one might have to deal with if one didn’t limit it in that fashion. But that’s really why I did that. And you might say, well, what do you mean by a career?

[00:15:52.07] And the definition of “career” to me comes from the etymology of the word, and the word means to run a race. It’s the same root as in the word “chariot” or “carriage.” And it’s any position that gives satisfaction and identity, one that the individual learns from, and it generally provides rising earnings or productivity with time on the job. That’s running the race. It isn’t a sudden increase in income.

[00:16:24.98] Rather, it is a position for which the individual is in it for the long haul, as in the race. Although the person sort of can morph and change, and you can have non-linear careers as well. In the book, there’s a very precise definition for the data. But I really like to think of it more as a position, a métier, an occupation in which you are learning and improving over time. And in general, that requires an increase in some initial amount of skills and we generally think of that as education.

[00:17:09.89] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. And thank you. So that really does clarify one of the key concepts in how you employ it throughout the book that was really of key interest to understanding your argument. The other, though, is family. Right? So you need to have some workable and measurable understanding of both of these concepts. So how do you end up defining “family” for purposes of the analyses and argument you make?

[00:17:37.75] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: So family is really simple. It’s just having a child, any child. It can be a biological child. It can be an adopted child. It could be one. In the book, it is not required that women have a partner, a husband, or a partner of the same sex. It’s a very, very simple way of doing it simply to say you have a child.

[00:18:09.96] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. Very good.

[00:18:12.58] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: And of course, for me, it means that dogs do not count. And as many people know, I have a dog, not a child. But he doesn’t count in my definition of this.

[00:18:25.63] LARRY BOBO: Although I assume there are occasions where the dog is needy and that somebody’s got to be on call.

[00:18:31.96] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: In fact, I often say to my friends who have children, at some point, your child will be able to make his own lunch. My dog cannot.

[00:18:41.50] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely. That’s right. That’s right. In laying out the framework you’re going to work with, you talk about the choices women make, the ambitions women have, and the opportunities women encounter. And can I get you to say a bit about the dynamics among those things before we turn to kind of the key organizing tool you use, which is a set of essentially experiential cohorts of women over time? So there’s a part of the story you tell us about exercising choice or autonomy in some way. Part of it is what people aspire to do, and part of it is what’s available to them.

[00:19:34.18] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Precisely. I mean, there are a set of outcomes that I’m thinking about, such as marriage or partnering, children, jobs, careers. But at the same time, individuals are faced with, in these cohorts or these groups that march over time, they’re faced with huge barriers and constraints.

[00:20:02.39] Some of them actual laws and regulations, such as marriage bars and anti-nepotism rules, that created all sorts of very serious barriers for women over the years. And of course, a set of norms and traditions that we carry with us. And even though we can strike down certain laws and set up others that are supposedly protective, we still have surrounding us a set of norms and traditions that are extremely difficult to shed.

[00:20:42.58] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. So as I see your argument unfolding, it’s kind of clear to me individual choices are being made. It’s also clear to me that opportunity structures can vary enormously over time. So for example, I was really quite unaware of the former anti-nepotism rules that, say, would have prevented a university or a department from hiring a husband and wife or something like that in a particular era.

[00:21:10.84] That was surprising to me and interesting to learn and the way in which it varied and has now largely disappeared, I think, as a practice. But there’s one thing that I think may be one of the key theoretical underpinnings or levers in your argument. And correct me if I’m wrong here, and that’s about how you think of ambitions. And it seems to me you largely assume that, everything else equal, women really do want virtually all of the same job prospects and opportunities as men and that that’s comparatively constant across the eras.

[00:21:50.12] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, I think that what I would say is that, by and large, if I took a woman who was born in 1900 and instead had her born in 1980, it would mean that she would have a very, very different set of barriers that she would face, far, far less.

[00:22:18.92] But my sense is that the biggest change is the change in what surrounded her rather than– I mean, in what way is she really different? Well, we could have all sorts of conversations about how this individual would be different over time or whether, at the beginning of the period, we’re selecting in the population from the elite and the richer group.

[00:22:54.44] And I can discuss that a bit. But my sense is that the biggest changes over time are not really the preferences of the individuals but the constraints and the barriers that they’re facing, which are enormous and which change in very, very big ways. Now, one might have thought that many of the changes over time, since the fraction of women and men who went to college and graduated from college 100 years ago was much, much smaller, far, far smaller than it is today, that many of the changes over time are because we’ve sort of expanded the type of individual who is going to college, who is able to go to college.

[00:23:41.24] And I can show that, from many of these large changes, particularly moving to what I call “group three,” that that doesn’t matter very much at all, not at all. That I could take the same group, I could take a group, for example, of Radcliffe College students who graduated in the early part of the 20th century and I can show that their family backgrounds are not much different than an equivalent group that graduated some 30 years later.

[00:24:14.88] And yet, the group that graduated 30 years later had a much, much higher fraction marrying and having children, different types of careers that they had. So the big changes are really the set of opportunities that they’ve had. Now, whether or not there are differences between men and women in their preferences for spending time with children or having their career or not is a somewhat different set of questions.

[00:24:47.99] LARRY BOBO: Right.

[00:24:49.43] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:25:20.66] Let me turn then, since you’ve started to introduce this, to the notion of the cohorts that you examine over basically the century-long period from 1910 to 2000. And the first of these, each cohort is kind of characterized as some connection between family commitments on the one hand and career commitments in the other. And this very first cohort you call the “family” or “career cohort” or “group one.”

[00:25:54.92] And it’s obviously, as the title puts it, women who really had to make a pretty stark choice. If you wanted to have a family, that is children, you really were giving up on the prospects of pursuing a demanding career. Or alternatively, if you chose a demanding career, you were largely forgoing the prospects of having a family. And let me say that, as I start to describe this quickly and then pose questions about it, one of the beautiful and really engaging things about how you’ve written this book is that you’re bringing both your lens as a labor economist interested in the experiences and places of women in the economy with your background as an economic historian.

[00:26:41.24] So there are very powerful portraits of women who have faced these choices and how it really played out in the texture of their lives. So the first cohort, who I think are entering the labor market at about 1900 to 1910 roughly, is the family or career cohort. There’s a subsequent cohort, group two, that get jobs, not really careers, but they find employment and then establish families.

[00:27:14.00] After that, there’s group three, which is an era for women in which they tend to start families first and then the job comes along. And in many ways, this is kind of the baby boom cohort or who produced the baby boom, I should say, in a way. And I’ll come back to that one, because that’s where my own mother would be positioned and I want to ask some questions about that. The fourth group is the career-then-family cohort.

[00:27:46.97] And then we get to much more contemporary or fifth group, which is trying to get it all, the career-and-family cohort. So let me go back to your very first cohort and let this be an opportunity for you to sketch out what it meant for women who were college-educated and faced in this era a really pretty stark choice between family or career. And you give one example of Jeannette Rankin. So who is Jeannette Rankin, and how does she illustrate this circumstance?

[00:28:24.13] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Yeah. I’m hoping that somewhere there is a writer and a producer who will make the movie about Jeannette Rankin. As far as I know, no one has. And I don’t understand why, because she had a fascinating life. And I mean, every one of the people that occupies this small space in my book, one can write volumes about and Jeannette Rankin is certainly one.

[00:28:56.83] And she was a first. She was the first woman in America elected to federal office. And I don’t want to spend too much time on her because the stories are involved, and I must say that I don’t know enough about her because the movie hasn’t been produced yet. But I can say that she had a fascinating career, many, many different parts of it.

[00:29:31.78] And she was one of the individuals who, after she was elected to Congress around the beginnings of the Great War, World War I, she was a pacifist. And so she voted against entry into World War I. She wasn’t the only one who voted about that. But of course, we entered World War I. She then ran for Senate rather than Congress in her state and she lost.

[00:30:09.13] She then did many, many other things for a couple of decades. And then right before World War II, yes, she comes back and she wins election. And she is, I believe, the only vote against entry into World War II. So she was a strong pacifist, and she also worked tirelessly for the vote.

[00:30:45.07] I have no idea about her personal life, and my guess is that someone who was as active and interesting as Jeannette Rankin had a fascinating personal life as well. And so one of the things that sort of gets lost in a book like mine in which I would say, well, Jeannette Rankin was in group one, she had career but not family, I am not saying that she didn’t have an active social and sexual life. I really don’t know. But it would be a very, very interesting thing to know about.

[00:31:25.58] But the point is that she was not alone in her group. Around 50% of the women who graduated college from 1900 to 1919, this is group one, never had a child and never adopted a child. And about a third of that group never married. Many of them married very, very late in their lives. Many who did marry married late.

[00:31:57.40] But you can see that 50% didn’t have a child or didn’t adopt a child. A third never married. That stands as an extreme case. And of course, it’s family or career. What I wanted to think about, though, is fast forwarding, sort of skipping over group two–

[00:32:21.45] LARRY BOBO: Sure.

[00:32:21.73] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: –which is a transition generation, to group three. And the reason is that group three graduates from the late ’40s to the mid-’60s. And in many ways, the group one and group three are as different as night and day. In group three, almost all married. I mean, it’s an amazingly high fraction. And the vast majority of the group that married had children, over 90%.

[00:32:53.83] So they are sort of night and day. But group three, as you said, had family and then had a job or a career. So in many ways, unlike what Betty Friedan said, Betty Friedan would have looked at this group, did look at this group, and said that they had regressed, that they weren’t as successful as the earlier group.

[00:33:21.58] But in fact, they were more successful. Because the earlier group, 50% of them never had children. And in group three, an extraordinarily high fraction did and they then succeeded to have a job or a career. And then if we fast forward again–

[00:33:44.64] LARRY BOBO: Well, let me stop there for a second. Let’s hold before we fast forward. I think you may be going to group five then, career and family. But let me pause on the family then job. Because it struck me as, in many ways, capturing my own mother’s experience, who graduated near the top of her class from Spelman College and then was admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a botany-zoology program.

[00:34:11.79] And here kind of race discrimination or bias and gender discrimination or bias intersect. Her mentor calls her into the office one day to say, look, it’s, quote, “a little unseemly” for a young colored girl to be sailing through this program so effortlessly, as if she was being cooled out of pursuing this career. And she eventually got the message and really left school ABD.

[00:34:41.89] She completed everything but the dissertation and got the message that it was time to go start having kids in a way, which is what she did, to marry and have kids. And so it very much fit your profile of family then job. But then becomes a public school teacher teaching science and health and related subject matter. So there’s a job of sorts but not the sort of career that would have accompanied the PhD and research and teaching in higher education. And it just struck me how it fit your characterization of this particular era.

[00:35:26.14] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Precisely. And on the one hand, we are thankful that she had children or else you wouldn’t be here to talk to me.

[00:35:35.68] LARRY BOBO: I know. I wouldn’t be here now. [LAUGHING]

[00:35:39.97] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: There’d be a younger Larry Two Bobo.

[00:35:44.59] LARRY BOBO: [LAUGHING] Right. Right.

[00:35:48.64] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: But what you’re stating as well is that she was faced still with enormous constraints.

[00:35:59.35] LARRY BOBO: Yes.

[00:35:59.62] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: And the constraints were of many different types. And I think that I, too, could say– it’s interesting that your mother was going into a field that was changing very, very rapidly. She was thinking about doing a PhD in a field called “zoology,” which, had she done it, probably she would have morphed into something else.

[00:36:29.17] When I first started out as a college student, I, too, was dedicated to a field that went through enormous changes at that time and it was bacteriology. And I went to Cornell University. Similar to Wisconsin, had an ag school that was a little more backward in its treatment of the sciences. And so there are lots of different constraints here.

[00:37:01.84] But when I went to Cornell, I went there to be a bacteriologist. I had done bacteriology in college. When I was in high school, at the Bronx High School of Science, I was absolutely committed to it. But when I got to Cornell, I don’t know whether it’s because I am and was a female that I did not get very much encouragement or because the field, bacteriology like zoology when your mother was in it, was going through rapid changes and the group that I was going to be studying with was a little bit behind.

[00:37:44.09] But I didn’t really get a lot of encouragement in terms of, you should do this set of courses to do well in this field. Which, let’s face it, in bacteriology, it morphed into what we see today, which is a far different field than just the study of infectious pathogens.

[00:38:09.10] LARRY BOBO: Yes. So let me go back to where you were a moment ago and fast forward to the career and family or group five stage and how we get to that transition and how, in particular, kind of opportunity structures really change in some important ways.

[00:38:28.63] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Sure. So if we fast forward from group three to group five, so if we fast forward again, both children and marriage are considerably delayed. Many continue with their education and try to cement their careers before cementing the rest of their lives. So in between three and five, of course, is group four.

[00:39:03.52] And group four was, once again, as different from group three as night and day. I mean, what’s fascinating about looking at this 100- and 120-year succession of generations is that the continuity is sort of continuity of a certain type of progress. But in fact, there are enormous changes. So group four, which is my generation, looked to group three and said, we don’t want that.

[00:39:38.14] We want family and career, but we don’t want to jettison in some sense the type of career. We don’t want just a job. We want something bigger than that. We want to be able to invest heavily upfront in our education. And the question is, how could you do that? You would have to put off marriage. You would have to put off children.

[00:40:07.35] And group four was sort of given a way of doing it. They were given the pill. And so they could delay marriage. They could delay having children without doing anything different in terms of their sexual and social lives. They could just sort of put it off, and that’s what group four did. It put off having children and marrying, invested heavily in further education.

[00:40:42.63] And what happened was that it had the highest fraction without children since group one. And so group five then looking back to it said, you forgot to have the kids. So we are going to continue to delay marriage and children to cement the career, but we are also going to cement the rest of our lives as well and have the children. And group five actually increased the rate of childbearing by quite a lot.

[00:41:26.07] LARRY BOBO: Let me turn in some of the time we have left to two other issues. One of which I thought was potentially a subject of some controversy, and you let me know if this is what you’ve encountered. One of the later chapters in the book is called “Mind The Gap,” where you return to this issue of the gender gap. And you state– and I would think in many people’s minds controversially, not necessarily scholars or economists but popular understanding, that quote, “Only a small part of today’s gender earnings gap for the full-time workers around $0.20 on the dollar is due to such factors as discrimination or women’s presumed lesser skill and experience in negotiating top salaries.”

[00:42:14.31] Indeed, you conclude, “But even if we eliminated all cases of discriminatory treatment and all instances in which women have been taken advantage of, the gender earnings gap would not narrow by much. The amount women earn would not rise substantially.” Have people reacted against that declaration, or did you regard it as controversial when you put it in the book?

[00:42:44.48] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: So it probably is controversial to some. But I have not received a tremendous amount of pushback in part because I always say that, first and foremost, there is discrimination. There is sexual harassment. There are cases in which women do not negotiate as well as they could do and that these should be changed, that these are what I call the “cockroaches” of the labor market and we should stomp them out.

[00:43:29.66] But even if we brought in the giant exterminator and got rid of them and they’re just like cockroaches in the New York City apartment. They’re always going to be there. They are always going to be there. And so it’s not as if they don’t exist, but I think that the reason that many people have read my book and said, yes, right on, thank you very much, is that this is that what I’m talking about in terms of the role of greedy work and the notion that there’s couple inequity and that couple inequity is at the root of much of gender inequality, that in many ways that is the dirty little secret that we all know.

[00:44:25.34] LARRY BOBO: Very much so. Let me add one further feature to the discussion, which you take up a small bit in the opening framing of the argument and then expand even further toward the conclusion of the book, about how the COVID-19 era has really reopened a focus on the working lives of women and how much greater tension they often face with their home and family obligations than men, that the pandemic era has really brought to the surface in some important ways.

[00:45:05.34] So can you speak to how you characterize your argument? As you put it, “BCE versus DC,” before the COVID era and now during COVID and however it continues to unfold.

[00:45:17.15] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Yes. So I was writing the book, and I had written much of it in the famous month of March of 2020. And COVID hit and I realized that the world was given a disaster and I was given an opportunity. And so COVID put a magnifying lens on the era that preceded it, what I call “BCE,” before the COVID era.

[00:45:57.21] So the COVID era has given us a far better understanding of the role of care for children, for the elderly, for sick family members. It has given us a better understanding of the mental burden of being the caregiver, of being the household manager. And we had begun and I hope that we continue it at some point, we had begun a national conversation on care that we haven’t had for a really long time.

[00:46:33.63] And as a historian, I could tell you when we’ve had these conversations. But we have a far better understanding and sense of the extreme risks, for example, of not having sick leave policy, of having a huge number of nursing home residents who died because of that.

[00:46:54.93] We have a better understanding of the fact that low pay for these workers meant that they were working in several homes and that led to some of the worst abuses in nursing homes. So the COVID era put a magnifying lens on many of the issues that we have always had. And suddenly, we can see them more clearly. Whether we have the national strength to do anything about it is another issue.

[00:47:31.52] LARRY BOBO: And this gets me toward some of the larger implications of your argument and what you would want to draw out of them. What do you think public policy, if anything, should be doing now to get us to a more equitable career experience for women? And are you sanguine about the prospects for us getting to a state of much deeper, genuine couple equity?

[00:48:04.47] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: So I think of change itself. So there’s change that occurs because of public policy. There’s change that occurs sort of systemically. There is change that occurs because firms find it profitable to change. So let me put these together and some of them, you’ll see, are public policies. So there are sort of three types of levers.

[00:48:35.87] One would change relative prices of care, of child care and elder care. A second one would change what I call the “price of flexibility” or the productivity of the more flexible jobs. I talked about greedy jobs. The opposite would be the more flexible job. So greedy jobs are jobs for which the price of flexibility is extremely expensive.

[00:49:08.01] So the second type of– let’s call them policies would change the cost of flexibility. And I want to say a bit about that, because the COVID era may, in fact, be this silver lining to this extremely dark cloud in the fact that we may see that there is a change in the cost of flexibility. I’ll return to that.

[00:49:36.05] The third point here is the most difficult one, which would be changing the social norms and traditions that we carry with us all the time, that we’d passed on from generation to generation, that are really very difficult to change, and that in some sense constrain women in heterosexual couples to be the main caregiver.

[00:50:02.15] Let me return for a moment about the COVID era and what may be the silver linings. And that is that many of the most lucrative jobs are jobs that are, as I said before, very greedy jobs. Among the most greedy jobs are the ones that require that you travel, that you go to Tokyo to sign a contract, that you go to Zurich to take part in a merger and acquisition.

[00:50:39.77] Those are jobs for which the individual who had major caregiving responsibilities couldn’t possibly take, and so those were the greedy jobs. And we see now that we may not have to do all of those. Firms could save on the costs of travel and hotel. They can hire the very, very best workers who couldn’t do this sort of traveling.

[00:51:14.31] So in fact, we have seen that the cost of flexibility, the productivity of flexible jobs has changed. The cost of flexibility has gone down. The flexible jobs have become more productive. The greedy jobs have become less greedy or some of them have become less greedy.

[00:51:36.87] And so that is not a public policy, but that is something that has come about in some interesting way. A public policy would involve changing the relative price of child care and of elder care. And we saw that incorporated into some of the Biden bills that, as I understand it, are sitting somewhere on the floor of Congress.

[00:52:10.97] LARRY BOBO: Sadly. Well, let me push you a little more on, are you sanguine on getting to greater couple equity? I mean, as you think about your own somewhat explicit theory of the prospects of what has driven change over this century that you examine– and you point to lots of changes, including lots of very positive change. Do you end up on a kind of hopeful note, or you’re just going to see how the data unfolds?

[00:52:39.37] CLAUDIA GOLDIN: I think that I am a very sanguine person. And part of the reason that I’m sanguine is that, as a historian, I look back and I do see a lot of progressive, positive change. The reason that I wrote the book and wrote it in the manner in which I did sort of– I linked together this long period of change, 100 and 120 years, however you want to measure it, of change in these cohorts, these groups passing the baton from one to the next, the baton essentially a set of warnings to the next generation what to do, what not to do.

[00:53:29.05] I linked that together with the fact that we can see today that we aren’t yet there, that there is a problem with no name that I have given a name to, and that it would be wonderful if that problem could be solved. So in some sense, I’m always sanguine. Because as a historian, I look back and I do see progressive change. I don’t see that we are stuck in the present, because I can see in the past that there has been changed. Exactly where the future change is going to come from, I can’t say.

[00:54:10.40] LARRY BOBO: Well, thank you so much, Claudia Goldin. And in particular, thank you for this very impressive, insightful, and really authoritative book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. It has been an enlightening and pleasurable conversation with you, and I look forward to our next opportunity to connect.

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