Career and Family by Claudia Goldin

SKIP TO: Key Takeaways

SKIP TO: Action Items for Parents

You can buy the book Career and Family, by Claudia Goldin, HERE.

Any parents concerned about work life balance for women – especially women and parents with daughters – should read Career and Family by Claudia Goldin. The book discusses the challenges modern women face in the career market, the historical ways women have tackled these challenges, and the root causes of the wage gap. (In brief, women tend to have more responsibilities at home.)

I appreciated that this book focused on the practical realities of what happens to parents’ working lives once they have kids. It doesn’t point fingers or blame anyone. Rather, it explains that couples are rational actors making choices based on the options in front of them. Unfortunately, many of these choices lead to a gendered wage gap. The book also describes characteristics of careers that are more likely to enable (and less likely to penalize) a good family-career balance.

Career and Family gave me a lot to think about. Many of Claudia Goldin’s points about the requirement to be on-call at work in order to advance at a law firm rang true for me, as did the number of hours and inflexibility of the work schedule that put me on track to partner. She specifically flags law as an area that has poor work life balance for women. I’ve had many doubts and questions about my own career path, and so it was immensely helpful to read through her analysis of how women have handled work life balance over the past 100+ years. It helped me see how I fit into a much bigger picture and that my problems are not unique to me or even to my generation.

First, I’ll highlight some practical action items I took away from my reading of Career and Family:

Let’s dig into the reasoning behind these recommendations.

Until couples have children, Goldin finds that the wage gap is relatively minor. Once couples have children, at most, one parent can work a greedy job. Someone must be on-call at home for child emergencies, doctor’s appointments, etc. So, who is on call?

The options

There are two options. The parents can share on-call duties equally, or they can pick one parent to be on call. Note that 67% of college graduate husbands and 80% of college graduate wives find the best marriage to be one where both spouses have jobs and take care of the house & children.² So one would think they would agree to share on-call duties equally. But this is not the case. Why? Because it is an expensive decision. Most couples choose to maximize their income instead.

Both on call at home

If the parents share the burden equally, then neither can take a “greedy” job. In this case, they may each be working 40 predictable hours each, for a total of 80 hours. In that case, they will be earning less by the hour than if one worked 60 irregular hours and the other 20 predictable hours.

By limiting their availability at work, they would both likely forfeit opportunities for promotion. That makes this a very expensive decision in terms of current and future earnings.

One takes the greedy job

On the other hand, if one parent takes the “greedy” job, the couple maximizes its income.

The cost is that one parent is on call at home and slows down his or her hours and/or availability at work. The on-call-at-home parent takes a job with more flexible, more predictable, and/or fewer hours. The parent with the greedy job is less accessible at home.

The woman tends to be the choice for the on-call-at-home parent.

The costs for women

Once on call at home, it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to outwork other employees who are not on call at home. Over time, the reduced hours and reduced flexibility an employee can offer at work results in fewer promotions, less experience, and less pay. And therein develops a wage gap between men and women.

If Goldin is correct, this means that the majority of the wage gap cannot be solved by eliminating gender bias in the workplace or teaching women to be more aggressive salary negotiators. These factors play a role, but they are not the root of the problem.³ The problem is that time is limited. Kids take time, careers take time, and couples want to maximize their income.

In a sense, this is comforting. Women are opting out of maximizing their personal income in order to pursue something else of value: time with children. Assuming they are doing this willingly in order to maximize their happiness or sense of fulfillment, I don’t take issue with that. Even if women tend to follow this trend more than men. The issue comes in if they are doing this because they feel they have no true choice in the matter, or if they are lacking the information required to make an informed choice. (Goldin’s book goes a long way toward informing parents of the economic costs of this choice!)

The costs for men

Although the book focuses on women, this issue is one that men and women share. There is also a (less discussed) cost for the one on call at work.

He or she sees less of the children and is present for fewer big moments. He or she devotes much more precious time and headspace to working and providing for the family remotely. That is time missed teaching, laughing with, getting to know, and investing in the next generation. Perhaps we cannot ascribe a numerical cost to this loss in the way that we can to the lost income that manifests as a wage gap. But it is absolutely a valuable price. Goldin notes that in a 2012 survey, 46% of dads described wanting to spend more time with their kids. Compare this with only 23% of women.⁴

Either parent can take the greedy job. Or neither! The most typical case right now is that the man takes the greedy job and the wife enables this by agreeing to be on-call at home.  But it doesn’t have to be that way. I came across an interesting article the other day discussing how some men are taking on-call duties at home so that the wife can be on call at work.

Regardless, after kids, the couple has to decide something. If they don’t decide explicitly, the decision occurs implicitly and resentment has more room to fester.

A more personal look at the choices

Both on call at home: You both decline to take greedy jobs and take an income and prestige hit together. You both slow down promotions. But you’re in the same boat, career-wise. No one is more on call at work or at home. You are both choosing to prioritize family and to spend more time with your children. But you may be less comfortable financially.

One takes the greedy job: One parent takes the greedy job and the other is on call at home. You have more income, and maybe earlier retirement as a result. One parent alone sacrifices personal income, prestige, and identity to the extent that parent’s identity depended on work. The parent who continues at work sacrifices time with the family. You as a couple have less in common on a day-to-day basis which may lead to your growing apart. Both of you are making big sacrifices, and you’re making different sacrifices, which can be isolating. Both of you are also experiencing different benefits, again, in isolation from your partner.

Benefits of having an explicit conversation

If you decide explicitly which option to take, you can each clarify your perceived benefits and sacrifices. You can better appreciate the other. You can also develop a specific plan for ameliorating sacrifices and share the joys of the benefits. (For instance, helping a parent find a sense of identity outside of work, via hobbies, writing, sports, etc., and agreeing as a couple to make that a priority.) You can review whether to change the deal between you at a given point in time because the costs are too high or the benefits aren’t great enough. And you open the door to understanding what the other’s day is like so you don’t grow apart.

The key thing in my mind is that no arrangement is perfect. And one’s feelings on how well the arrangement is working can change over time.

One thing that strikes me about the public conversation surrounding women in the workforce is that it often seems to revolve around childcare options. It would seem that if we only had 24-hour, 365-days-a-year childcare, women could finally devote the same amount of time to work and be on equal footing with men!

It’s not just about good childcare

Certainly, good quality childcare is important. But it does not solve the issue entirely. Even if there was perfect around-the-clock care for my children, I personally want to be there for many of their experiences. Spending time with kids is not a chore comparable to washing dishes. It is inherently valuable. I want to get to know my kids and be a major part of their lives. And I want to tease them and play with them and understand who they are. These things are valuable, fulfilling, and all take a substantial amount of time.

When I think of what type of life I want for my daughter when she’s fully grown, it involves the possibility of her having kids. In that case, I want her to feel like she has time be the kind of mother she wants to be. I don’t want her to feel like she is missing out on one of the most important and precious experiences of her life in order to advance at work or maintain economic parity with her husband. But I also don’t want her to be trapped at home.

A framework

So I want to think – I want her to think – about what traits she should be looking for in a long term career. What are the best jobs for working moms? What will give her the ability to have a job that is exciting, competitive, intellectually challenging, and demanding? But where she will not be overly penalized if she decides to step back a bit when she has kids, and therefore less time and flexibility she can offer to her workplace?

To be clear, I don’t want to push my daughter into any particular field. I want to give her a framework so that she can better plan her future. She should consider her interests, but also what fields are likely to enable a good work life balance for moms. I want her to make an informed decision. Even so, she might be like me and decide to take the competitive job route thinking she’ll just figure out the balance part once she has kids, if she even has kids. But she’ll be making an informed decision and be prepared for the likely consequences in her career of choice.

I’m not sure that makes the average man a winner here. Certainly those with some of the greediest jobs have significant tangible benefits: personal financial security, prestigious job titles, a (sometimes) stimulating or exciting subject of work, and a feeling of personal independence.

What’s the point of it all?

I don’t want either of my sons to be resigned to a life oriented around climbing a career ladder for money and prestige and independence. I don’t want them to be remote providers for a family they rarely see. A phenomenal career is a great thing. But it has much greater meaning when you’re surrounded by people who need you and care for you and about your successes. And it keeps you grounded to recognize you’re doing a job to provide for and take care of a family who loves you. You’re not doing it for prestige and extra funds.

For this reason, I intend to encourage my boys to think not only about what careers they might be passionate about, but also to consider the role they want to play in their families one day. Do they want to be constantly on call outside their home? Is there a profession that would permit them to be more available fathers and husbands? So, similar to my daughter, I’m hoping to provide them with a framework which will enable them to consider what types of jobs are more compatible with work life balance in addition to what they’re passionate about or what is most likely to be lucrative. We’re presumably on this earth for more than maximizing our incomes and prestige, after all.

There are some fields where there is a smaller wage gap and where women are much more likely to remain employed full-time while they have small children at home. The best jobs for working moms tend to be areas that permit flexible hours, don’t penalize workers for taking short leaves of absence, and where there is a good degree of replaceability among workers (i.e., one person doesn’t have to see a particular task all the way from start to finish). This likely means that the services or products will need to be more standardized and where decisions are fairly routine (not novel). This may also include industries that are more protected due to a limited supply of workers (for instance, doctors).

On the other hand, jobs that involve coordinating individuals and providing individualized or unique services and products are more likely to require one person to see a job through from start to finish. These positions are likely to demand and reward long and irregular hours, and therefore are not likely to be good jobs for working moms. They also tend to have more income inequality among men. In other words, general inequality of earnings among workers within a profession a good indicator that it is not a family friendly job.

Goldin also notes that practices that are dominated by a few large companies rather than small businesses are likely to be more family friendly. Small business ownership tends to coincide with business risk, a need for on-call and long hours, and very disparate incomes.

A few specific professions Goldin highlights as likely to be among the best jobs for working moms (or at least trending that way) are pharmacists, veterinarians, and MDs. Professions that are particularly bad for working moms include those requiring JDs, MBAs (the worst!), and PhDs. More on this below.

This is the less practical stuff, but I found it fascinating. Just three (long) takeaways:

There is much, much more data and analysis in Goldin’s book Career and Family. If you also find these topics interesting, I strongly recommend picking up the book!

The wage gap is often presented as evidence that women earn less than men for the same work. Goldin evaluates several possible explanations for why this might be the case.

One explanation is the concept of occupational segregation (e.g., women choose to be nurses while men choose to be doctors). Goldin explains this accounts for less than half of the wage gap.⁵

Another explanation is discrimination against women. Goldin finds that discriminatory treatment of women does not account for much of the gap either. ⁶

Goldin finds that at least two thirds of the gender based earnings gap comes from factors within an occupation⁷  and that the earnings gaps are larger for the more highly educated.⁸ Goldin states that only a “small fraction of the total earnings gap” can be explained by unequal earnings for the same work.⁹ To understand why she says this, it’s important to understand how the gap is calculated.

How is the Wage Gap Calculated?

The gap is determined by taking the median annual earnings of all males working full-time (35+ hours per week) on a year-round basis and comparing it with the median annual earnings for the same class of female workers.¹⁰ Goldin explains that although this metric has the virtue of simplicity, it covers over a few important realities:

• the average male working full time works longer hours his female counterpart;
• more men work on-call and irregular hours than women;
• the earnings gap is not static, but tends to fluctuate for women over the course of their lives. It tends to be minimal right after college or graduate school, increase after marriage or cohabitation (couples often relocate, maximizing the male’s career prospects), and jumps after women start a family.¹¹

What explains these differences, and when does the wage gap develop?

Longitudinal data clarify that within the first few years of employment after college or graduate school, there is only a slight initial wage gap.¹² The gap develops over time, about ten years out from graduation. The changes typically begin within a year or two of the birth of a first child.¹³

There is one graph¹⁴ in Goldin’s book that was particularly revealing on this topic. It showed how the wage gap for the 1990 MBA graduates from University of Chicago Booth School progressed over 13 years, broken down for women with, and women without, children. Both groups of women began earning 95 cents on the male dollar immediately following graduation. For women without children, this 95 cent number fluctuated, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but no clear trend emerged over time. At 13 years, it was at around 93 cents on the dollar. However, for women with children, a distinct downward trend can be seen, dropping to 63 cents on the dollar by year 13.¹⁵

Goldin notes that an in-depth look at the women behind these trends demonstrates that the drop in earnings is not constant over time or random, but rather emerges upon the birth of a first child.¹⁶ The change is not immediate. After a year or two, some mothers begin cutting back, but the largest changes do not transpire until three to four years after the mom gives birth to her first (or only) child.

Outside the United States

Additional studies conducted in Nordic countries, which have some of the most generous family-friendly policies in the world (subsidized childcare and extensive periods of paid leave for both parents), find very similar trends.¹⁷ In Sweden, for example, husbands making the same amount as their wives before a birth were likely to be earning 32% more than her 15 years out from the birth of their first child.

I have my own ideas about what I don’t like about how my mother’s career (she was also a lawyer) interfered with her raising of me and my sister. And I have my ideas about what I don’t like about how my own career conflicted with my children’s lives. But it’s so helpful to see what has and hasn’t already worked.

I think it’s easy to forget that many, many women have dealt with this conflict before. So I’m going to spend some time here reviewing Goldin’s breakdown of the 5 groups of women who came before us. What they did right, what they regretted, and how we got to where we are now. I will go into a bit of depth, but not nearly on the level Goldin achieves in her book.

Five Groups of Women

Claudia Goldin begins Career and Family by discussing the recent history of women in the United States labor force. She focuses exclusively on college-graduate women. She divides them into five groups based on birth year. I thought it was helpful to think about the years they were graduating / getting married / having children, so I put together the below summary of the five groups:

Group	Description	Birth Year	College Graduation	35 Years Old
1	Family or Career	1878-1897	1900-20	1913-32
2	Job then Family	1898-1923	1920-45	1933-58
3	Family then Job	1924-43	1946-65	1959-78
4	Career then Family	1944-57	1966-79	1979-92
5	Career and Family	1958-78*	1980-2000*	1993-2013*

*Goldin considers Group 5 to be ongoing, but she cuts the group off at birth year 1978 so that we can review some initial data about this group as they have aged.

Group 1: “Family or Career”

Born between 1878 and 1897, these ladies graduated college between 1900 and 1920. They hit 35 between 1913 and 1932. They were age 32 to 51 at the start of the Great Depression (1929-41).

Many of these women chose between a family and a career. Therefore, this group had relatively low rates of marriage and childbearing. About 30% of Group 1 never married,¹⁸  and 50% of this group did not have children.¹⁹

Of the unmarried women, most worked at least at some point in their lives.²⁰ Many did not have to settle on husbands for financial reasons – they could provide for themselves.²¹ The women who did have careers were primarily schoolteachers. Given the restrictions on what married women could do, many may have preferred to stay single.²²

Of the married women, around 70% had children. Whereas women with more family resources could choose not to marry, many women with fewer resources married early for financial support.²³ Few of these married women worked at any point in their lives.

Goldin emphasizes that these women’s options were different – not their preferences.²⁴ This was a result of many factors: hiring regulations (such as marriage bars and anti-nepotism rules), social norms, the labor required to run a household prior to the advent of many time-saving appliances, the lack of reliable contraception, and the high mortality rates for small children in a time before antibiotics.

Successes & Lessons

Successes: Some women had careers; some women had families.

Lessons: A need for financial stability can induce women to marry early, even if this forces her to give up her career aspirations. Many women choose to forego a career if it requires sacrificing having a family.

Group 2: “Job then Family”

Born between 1898 and 1923, these ladies graduated college between 1920 and 1945. They would have been very affected by the onset of the Great Depression (1929 – 1941) which would have hit after most had started families. They reached age 35 between 1933 and 1958.

Goldin describes this as a transitional group. There were lower marriage and fertility rates at the beginning of the pack, and high marriage and fertility rates toward the end of the pack.

Most of the women in this group married and had children. 82% of the second half of this group married,²⁵ and among those, about 80% had children.²⁶ The average marriage age remained relatively high, which permitted college women to work for several years before having children, gain some work skills, and then return to work once her children were older.²⁷ While the majority were employed before marriage, few remained employed following marriage.

Goldin notes that for those women born around 1910, 30% worked in their late 20s, more than 40% worked in their late 30s, and 60% did by their late 40s. The growth in employment rates as these women aged is explained in part by children leaving home. It is also explained by the changes to the labor market during these years which made it more acceptable for a married woman to work (described below).

The Sea Change: Married Women Can Work!

Goldin explains that something changed during the Group 2 years such that successful women were able both to marry and work, although their successes were typically achieved after they had children. She believes the shift is primarily explained by two factors.

First, a stay-at-home wife became less valuable due to the advances in time-saving home appliances such as refrigerators (in 70% of homes by the 1940s), vacuums (50% of homes), and washing machines (60% of homes). In addition, however, advances in plumbing and sewage greatly reduced the labor required to run a house.

Second, the white-collar labor market expanded.²⁸ Whereas in 1900, only 17 percent of working women had white collar jobs, by 1930, 45 percent of women were employed in white collar jobs.²⁹ These jobs offered good pay, were “less physically demanding and safer,” and “cleaner and in more comfortable settings” than alternatives in manufacturing or in domestic service. Because of these factors, the social stigma surrounding women working subsided.

Interestingly, Goldin notes the stigma against married women working likely developed to protect women and incentivize men to work during a time when many jobs for men were risky, dirty, and nasty. The stigma served as a rebuke to husbands or fathers who permitted their wives to work a job that “not only took her from her children and the care of her home but also was potentially injurious to her health.”³⁰

The Great Depression

Although many of Group 2 women worked while married before having children due to the changes in the labor market, the onset of the Great Depression (1929 – 1941) caused a temporary reversal of this trend. The 1930s saw expansion of restrictive policies toward women working including via marriage bars. In 1930, these women would have been between the ages of 33 and 52. The marriage bars were largely outlawed by the 1950s, but these women would have been older by that time. (In 1950, they were age 53 to 72.)

Successes & Lessons

Successes: Women can be married and have jobs at the same time, provided they don’t have young children at home.

Lessons: Women had to wait for kids to grow up and husbands’ careers to be set before pursuing a career.

Group 3: “Family then Job”

Born between 1924 and 1943, these ladies graduated from college between 1946 and 1965.³¹ They would have reached age 35 between 1959 and 1978.

These were the 1950s housewives we think of today and that were described in Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.

Nearly 90% of this group of college graduates married, and more than 90% who married had a child.³² These women tended to marry young (the median college-graduate woman married before 23)³³ and have children young (60% had their first child before 30), more than any of the other group.³⁴ There were about 3.14 births per woman among these women who had children.³⁵ Divorce rates nearly tripled for those who married in the 1960s as compared with those who married in the 1950s.³⁶

By the time these ladies came into the workforce, many marriage bars had lifted for employment.³⁷  Many of these women were employed after graduating from college, even if they married. But they left the workforce after having children and while raising them.³⁸ Once the children were older, many of these women tried to return to the workforce but had a difficult time because they lacked the necessary skills having been out of the labor market for so long.

Note on The Feminine Mystique

Goldin notes that Friedan’s description of women retreating from the workforce in order to be truly feminine was not very accurate.³⁹ Rather, this group received more advanced degrees,⁴⁰ dropped out of college at lower rates,⁴¹ and was more likely to be employed six months after graduating. In fact, 75% of these women were employed six months after graduating, including those who married.⁴² Goldin notes that women graduating from college during this period were typically graduating with teaching certificates or majoring in other areas that led directly to an occupation. From this, she gleans that these women intended to work, after marriage and again once any children were school age.⁴³ She notes that Friedan published her book before many of these women returned to work, so she was unable to see their game plan come to fruition.⁴⁴

Only about 30% of mothers continued to work while they had young children at home.⁴⁵ In part, this was because the cost of childcare washed out any income they brought home. It was also due to the widespread perception that small children suffered when their mothers worked.⁴⁶ These women did return to work once the children were back in school – about 70% were working again by their 40s.⁴⁷

Jobs for this group were generally distinct from careers. They were typically conceptualized as a back up plan in case a husband was unable to provide.⁴⁸ And it was seen as secondary to the husband’s higher-earning career.⁴⁹ And the jobs were predominantly in secure, steady, and traditionally female positions.

Successes & Lessons

Successes: Graduated at higher rates and obtained degrees that enabled them to exit and return to the workforce once children were out of the home. A higher number of women joined the workforce.

Lessons: The dangers of investing in a husband’s career at the expense of one’s own and that women could find themselves “unexpectedly divorced, with rusty workplace skills.”⁵⁰ Limitation on the ability to advance after returning to the workforce due to insufficient investment in more advanced education or professional schools after college (they were busy having babies at this time).⁵¹ Children sometimes felt that their mothers were unhappy and sacrificing their career aspirations for the children’s benefit.⁵²

Group 4: “Career then Family” (My mom fits in here!)

Born between 1944 and 1957, these ladies graduated college from 1966 to 1979. They would have come of age alongside the women’s movement (Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was published in 1963).  They reached age 35 between 1979 and 1992.

This was the first group to see big changes due to the release of the Pill for commercial sale (by prescription) in 1961.⁵³ The Pill enabled women to delay children and marriage. These women could invest in developing a long-term career (not merely a job) before having a family. This investment period permitted them to pursue more advanced degrees and enter careers like law, medicine, academia, finance, and management.

Goldin notes that these were careers, distinct from jobs. Unlike a job, a career shapes one’s identity, requires investment and growth, and is long-lasting, sought-after employment.⁵⁴ Rather than seeing credentials and job skills as insurance against a husband’s inability to provide, these women saw a career as exciting, fulfilling, and to be pursued for its own sake.⁵⁵ Unfortunately, many delayed having children for so long they were ultimately unable to do so. Childlessness peaked at 28% for this group (33% for women with graduate or professional degrees).

Those who did have children continued to work while they had infants at home, making a big break from the past.⁵⁶

The divorce rate that began to tick up in the 1960s continued to tick up. Couples reacted to the increase in divorce by investing less in their marriages and households. They began to value economic independence more.⁵⁷ For those married in the 1970s, 37% of couples were divorced within the first 20 years of marriage (compared with 29% of those marriages begun in the 1960s).⁵⁸

Successes & Lessons

Successes: Women no longer worked to top off family income. Rather, they worked in order to fulfill their own desires and sense of self, and to have economic independence.⁵⁹ Women began to identify with their careers, to the point where leaving the workforce involved a loss in identity, so they have stayed employed much longer than women have historically.⁶⁰

Lessons: “That which is deferred is often never accomplished.”⁶¹ These women had focused on preventing pregnancy, but they did not yet understand the consequences of delaying childbearing (reduced fertility and risks of older eggs). “The potential of birth defects from old eggs hadn’t yet made it onto anyone’s radar screen.”⁶²

Group 5: “Career and Family”

Born after 1958, these ladies graduated from college in 1980. They began reaching age 35 in 1993. Goldin describes this group as ongoing, but she focuses on women who were born up until 1978 (who turned 35 in 2003) for the sake of observing a more complete picture of these women.

This group of women is defined as having both a career and a family. They were the first to begin openly expressing a desire for both career and family.⁶³ They did not want to put off having kids until a career was well in place and risk never having a family. They were greatly assisted in this effort by advances in reproductive technology.

Fertility Technology

In 1982, a study established that fertility began to decline much earlier than had previously been believed – a rapid decline from age 31 to age 35.⁶⁴ The popular press was generally silent on the topic of fertility decline as women age until the 1980s, quickly giving way to articles about the promise of infertility procedures such as in vitro fertilization.⁶⁵ Due to widespread silence on the topic (and lack of focused research), many women in Group 4 did not realize the risks of delaying childbearing or the timing of the fertility sunset.

Group 5 delayed marriage and childbearing even more so than Group 4.⁶⁶ 31% of Group 4 had a baby by age 26; 22% of Group 5 did. But the women in Group 5 were keenly aware of the fertility sunset and made up for lost time in their late 30s and early 40s. By their 40s, a greater percentage of Group 5 had started families than had Group 4. Goldin estimates that up to 50% of the increase in first births occurred because of advances in reproductive technology.⁶⁷

The fraction of women who did not have children dropped to a low of 20% for this group. Nearly 80% of college graduate women who are currently in their mid-to-late 40s have given birth to a child. Fifteen years prior, this number was 73%.

The Persistence of the Wage Gap

The economic success of Group 5 as younger women has remained low. This is due to many of the most educated and talented women tending to work part time while their kids are young. Many of these ladies find it difficult to ramp back up later in life.⁶⁸

Goldin points to the Harvard and Beyond study, which collected information on women graduating from Harvard in 1970 (Group 4), 1980 (Group 5), and 1990 (Group 5) 15 years after graduation.⁶⁹ The thinking was that most of these women would have come up for a major promotion (partnership, tenure, etc.) and would have had any children byt the time of the study.  Presumably this group would be well prepared academically, have the most resources, and be persistent and demanding personalities. This was a group of women who have invested highly in their careers and from whom one would expect success.⁷⁰

The study revealed that about 90% of these women were employed 15 years after graduation – but about 30% were working “part time” as compared with industry standards for full time. Of the 10% of women not working, 90% of these had young children. Of the 30% working part time, 80% had young children. Only 30% of these women both had children and worked full time. By comparison, 65% of the men worked full time and had children. The critical point is that this trend for women and men held, regardless of whether you looked at the 1970, 1980, or 1990 class!

Successes & Lessons

Successes: Able to have a family and career at the same time.

Lessons: As long as women do more at home, and work disproportionately rewards high and unpredictable hours, there will be a wage gap. Women are more likely to drop out of jobs that require high and unpredictable hours when they have young children at home than to drop out of jobs with fewer and/or predictable hours. Other lessons TBD.

What careers are least likely to penalize the on-call-at-home spouse for being on call at home? 53% of women asked what they considered important about their jobs answered flexibility (compare this with 29% of men).⁷¹ Goldin asks, what are the occupational characteristics that render jobs more equitable between genders (suggesting less of a penalty for the on-call-at-home parent)?

I’m going to butt in here to make a note that finding a job where women are more likely to be compensated at similar hourly rates as men (after adjusting for experience and flexibility of work schedule) is not all that meaningful if it means a woman isn’t earning much at all and there aren’t career goals for her to strive toward. Fortunately, Goldin describes high-median-earnings professions. However, jobs with high median earnings are not the same as the jobs with the highest earning potentials, which is likely to be a major downside for the extremely competitive among us, regardless of whether or not they want a family.

Advanced Degrees

Off the bat, Goldin notes that many of the most prestigious degrees (JD, MBA, MD, and PhD) lead to jobs in the most lucrative fields. These are also the ones with the greatest income inequality. These jobs tend to reward significant time investment. For this reason, women in these fields who are on call at home are at a fundamental disadvantage. They will likely fare worse than those not on call at home. The MBAs fare the worst, and the MDs (although it varies a lot by specialty) the best among the women with these degrees fifteen years after graduation.⁷²

Goldin provides a break down from the Harvard and Beyond study of the professions where women are most likely to remain working full time with children. MBAs were the least likely (around 30%), JDs were in the middle of the pack (about 33%) and MDs were the best (around 45%).⁷³ Goldin suggests this is because certain sectors have less flexible work hours and impose greater penalties for short hours and leaves of absence.⁷⁴

Occupational Traits

Goldin also reviewed information about roughly 500 different occupations in the US to determine which ones had the best and worst earnings ratios across genders to determine the factors the jobs held in common. She explains we should expect to see smaller gender earnings gaps in jobs where long or unpredictable hours aren’t worth paying a premium. This essentially means areas where firms can substitute workers and where the services or products are more standardized.

We should expect to see larger gaps in fields demanding long, irregular hours, where clients demand to see specific professionals who coordinate teams of experts to provide individualized services or products. Goldin explains, “The [extra] compensation is sort of like hardship pay.”⁷⁵ “But the features of the jobs they have now are the reason why [women] are earning less. These are the aspects of jobs that make a particular – lawyer, accountant, consultant, financial advisor – indispensable to the account, client, deal.”⁷⁶

She concludes that those professions with high time demands and/or high competition have larger earnings gaps. Therefore, she concludes that a good way to measure if a job is not family friendly is to see if the job has significant income inequality among men.⁷⁷

Goldin argues that one solution to the problem is to change the system so that it doesn’t cost so much for couples to opt to remain “equals” (I don’t like this terminology, see below). To explain the type of system change that could produce this result, Goldin reviews how the pharmacist profession has changed over time.

Possible Solutions

Currently female pharmacists rank 5^th in terms of median earnings among women – female lawyers are 7^th.⁷⁸ At the same time, the field has a relatively narrow wage gap (once adjusted for hours of work, the median is 94 cents on the male dollar).⁷⁹ It was once much like law (long, irregular hours, requirements to be on call constantly, high rates of self-employment and therefore business risk). This was the case because pharmacists had personal relationships with clients, and the pharmacist would compound a drug for a particular client on demand. They had to be on-call for urgent prescriptions.

This all changed as drugstores became big businesses. More and more pharmacists transitioned from small business owners to being employees.⁸⁰ In addition, drugs became more standardized and compounding was no longer needed. IT streamlined access to information about what other prescription drugs a client may be taking so that any pharmacist could advise the client regarding drug interactions. Personal contact with a given pharmacist lost its importance. And late-night pharmacies removed the need for pharmacists to be on call.⁸¹

Collectively, these changes meant that pharmacists became essentially interchangeable, so there was no benefit to one pharmacist working long or irregular hours.⁸² For this reason, there is now no discernable penalty (on an hourly basis) for part-time work. This means that many (about 33%) female pharmacists work part time for about 10 years starting when they are about 30. It also means they don’t take much time off after having a child when compared with lawyers and women in finance.⁸³ (They don’t need to take lots of time off when they can easily return to a predictable, part-time schedule.)

Goldin describes similar changes occurring in certain medical specialties and in veterinary medicine.

I thought Goldin treated this topic very fairly in general. But I have two basic issues.

Couple Inequity

Throughout Career and Family, Goldin purports to address the root cause of “couple inequity” or “inequality.” But I don’t see a clarification of these terms mean, even though they appear about 70 times throughout the book (counting is one of the advantages of reading e-books). Some quotes (emphasis added):

“Women disproportionately take jobs with more predicable and flexible hours, so they can spend more time taking care of child and household needs and emergencies. Couple inequity results.”⁸⁴

“It also means that women, in the aggregate, earn less, even on a per hour basis, than do men. That creates gender inequality.”⁸⁵

“The family will be slightly poorer in terms of their income, but they will be monumentally richer in terms of couple equity.”⁸⁶  

“[T]hey will never provide a complete solution to gender inequality, because they treat only the symptoms. They will never enable women to achieve both career and family to the same degree as men.⁸⁷

I think it is worthwhile to examine exactly what we saying is unequal. And who is the loser?

As I mentioned above, if we look at male/female equality as an equation, many, including Goldin, seem to reduce it to the aspects that are most easily measured (i.e., income). It is true then, that if we measure men and women’s equality after children by looking at only their relative median incomes, Male Income > Female Income.

Reimagining the equation

But income is not the full picture! Women are not irrational actors. They are rationally giving up income / prestige / career satisfaction in order to acquire something else of value. Women aren’t giving up income and career prospects to support their husbands these days. They want time with their children. That time has value, even if it is hard to put a number on it.

Further, spending time with children is not the same as simply fathering a child (the latter being what Goldin refers to as “family success”).⁸⁸ When we talk about “family success,” we need to be a little more specific. There is a difference between having a child, taking little or no time off, and rarely seeing that child during the week as happens with many men (is this really “success?”), and seeing that child at regular intervals during the week because you’re the on call parent.

If we expand the equation to incorporate the value of time with children, perhaps we would get something more equal: (Male Income + Time with Family) = (Female Income + Time with Family).

The picture has to be bigger than income

When this male/female equity analysis is reduced to income, it suggests that when women take an income hit to spend time with their children, they are either (a) irrational or (b) coerced to give up income and career prospects. Either women are not serious if they want to cut back hours to spend time with kids, or they are being forced into undesired labor, akin to doing laundry. The income-based analysis doesn’t ascribe any value to what most mothers have chosen to do with their lost work time.

I would argue that because the valuable nature of parent-child time isn’t part of the mainstream discussion, we as a society are undervaluing parent-child time. Not only that, we are making mothers feel like they must be either irrational or weak enough to be coerced into stepping off the career fast-track in order to purse something that has no widely-agreed or assessed value.

It is already hard as the on-call-at-home parent not to feel resentful about taking a career step backward sometimes. But I think we could all use the reminder and acknowledgement that these parents are doing something valuable with their time. And, just maybe, the equation does balance and there is some equity to be found.

Less Exciting Work

The other issue I have with Goldin’s Career and Family is on the topic of making jobs more equal. Whether a job is a good job for working moms essentially turns on the interchangeability of workers. It makes sense that this would be the case, but I personally have no desire to work a job where the best thing I can hope for is to be seamless with the rest of the machine.

What is the motivation, if you’re not doing something unique or that somehow specifically requires your set of skills and ingenuity? Maybe I’m being naïve about how unique my own labor and skills are, but I do think that the feeling that you can do a better job at a project than anyone else can is a significant motivator for many. But maybe that’s why I went to law school.

The corollary to this is that a naturally competitive woman is going to want excitement and risk and competition. She will not make decisions based on the best median female income. She’s going to want to choose a competitive field that has access to the highest possible incomes to see how hard she can push herself and how high up she can get.

I also don’t know enough about pharmacy to understand if it truly could ever have really been like law. In law, there is a major difference between working with a lawyer who has been practicing for 5 or even 10 years, and one who has been practicing for 20 years. The law is vast, nuanced, and learning on the job only enhances one’s ability to be a good lawyer. So I don’t know how interchangeable lawyers could ever truly be, but maybe they just need more standardized products and services. Food for thought.

Read The Group by Mary McCarthy. This is a semi-autographical novel about Group 2.

Read the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Feel the rage from Group 3 before they returned to work.

I also recommend this book for parents thinking about careers for the next generation. Goldin makes some interesting points about what job characteristics are most compatible with maintaining a career while having a family.

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4. Pew Research (2012). Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 266. ↩︎
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7. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 19. ↩︎
8. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 205. ↩︎
9. Goldin explains that 40% of men/women who are college graduates, or 50% of all workers, would need to shift occupations to achieve equality here. If this were accomplished, only about 1/3 of the gap would be eliminated. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 204. ↩︎
10. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 204. ↩︎
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15. Interestingly, Goldin notes 18% of the women with children were working part time 13 years out; 17% of the women were not employed. These women would not have been included in the wage gap calculation given they were not working full time. ↩︎
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36. 47. The divorce rate began to increase in the 1960s as state laws began to permit unilateral divorce. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 156. ↩︎
37. The marriage bars were largely outlawed by the 1950s. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 122. ↩︎
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53. Goldin notes, however, that the monumental impact of the Pill wasn’t really felt until the age of majority was dropped to 18 years, which happened in the early 1970s. Remember that doctors were not allowed to prescribe the pill to unmarried women below the age of majority without parental consent – greatly reducing the ability of college-age women to obtain it. By 1976, Goldin notes that over 70 percent of single eighteen or nineteen year olds had taken the pill. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 160. ↩︎
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73. Those with only an MA were even less likely to be working full time with children (around 22%). ↩︎
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79. 94 cents on the male dollar. Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family. E-book, p. 246, 242. ↩︎
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