Before she was a Nobel Prize winner, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office, or president of the American Economic Association, Claudia Goldin discovered economics in some unusual places. What could explain the rise of female musicians in symphony orchestras in 1980, she asked in an early research paper. What have pharmacists discovered that makes the profession very gender-equal? How did changes in U.S. law during the Vietnam War increase female enrollment in law schools?
All of these issues are relevant to Goldin’s career focus – barriers to women’s participation in the labor market and gender equality – for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday.
At early stages Paper In a paper Goldin co-authored with her husband and frequent collaborator Lawrence Katz, the two Harvard economics professors pointed to the rise in women’s enrollment in higher education and the labor force in the 1970s. One explanation: birth control pills.
The drug was first patented in 1955 and became widely available until the early 1970s, when a combination of state and federal law changes lowered the legal age of majority from 21 to 18. Originally passed in response to criticism of the draft (under which 18-year-olds unable to vote could still enlist in and die in war), the law had the secondary effect of allowing millions of young women to do so without parental permission Obtain contraceptives. The drug combined with new laws and the women’s rights movement to increase women’s participation in work and public life. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of women in law schools more than tripled and the number of women in business schools increased tenfold, while the proportion of women married before age 24 plummeted, from nearly half to less than 30 percent.
Martha Kimbell, a fellow at Yale Law School and a former White House economist, said the pill “allows women to delay having children and get more return on their investment in the workforce.”
“If … you think you’re going to start having kids and stop working as much, then going to school may not make sense for you — you’re not going to get as much return on your investment,” Kimbell told wealth. “But if you have control over your reproductive future and choose to delay having children, it makes more sense to go to medical school now.”
But it’s not just good for women who suddenly have a career choice, say Goldin and Katz. The authors argue that by making unmarried sex (or the consequences of pregnancy) easier, birth control pills allow young people to “try before they buy,” making them more selective about their eventual spouses and ultimately leading to longer marriages.
How to hire an orchestra
Another morning Paper A book Goldin co-authored with Princeton University economist Cecilia Rouse examines the role of sex discrimination in hiring musicians. The paper shows that once a symphony orchestra begins conducting blind auditions, in which candidates are hidden behind a screen, the proportion of female musicians hired increases dramatically.
“In retrospect, it was so simple and so clean. But no one had thought of that before,” said the paper’s Kimbell. “Simplicity in economics is really hard to achieve.”
Golding’s work also often reveals counterintuitive findings.Before Goldin began studying 200 years of female labor force participation, the Associated Press wroteMany economists simply assume that as countries develop from agricultural to industrial societies, the proportion of women working gradually increases.
But Goldin’s research, which painstakingly compiled her own database and compiled historical records that often underestimated women working on farms or in cottage industries, found the opposite: In the past, the Nobel committee said Married women’s work participation has followed a U-shape over two centuries. wrote. The share of women in the workforce actually declined as the United States and Europe entered the Industrial Revolution, but later rose again as the service industry developed.
Greedy family, greedy job
Goldin’s research also illustrates the changing nature of the gender pay gap – a gap that has narrowed over the years but has not disappeared, with American women now earning about 18% less than men. Over the past few decades, much of this gap has been driven by the disparity between traditionally high-paying male jobs (construction, manufacturing, law enforcement) and traditional low-paying female jobs (teaching, caregiving, social services).But Golding’s research shows that today this is largely due to fertility.
Golding, 77, tells us that among high-achieving couples, “the woman often takes a step back and the man steps forward,” she tells us. planet money 2021.
Goldin coined the term “greed jobs,” high-paying jobs in tech or law that require employees to come to work at unusual times, such as Sunday nights, dinners, or holidays. The nature of these jobs forces couples to divide their time, with the wife often choosing to take on family responsibilities at home (to the detriment of her career), while the husband prefers to work.as planet money Journalist Stacey Vanek-Smith points out that this is a financially logical choice to maximize family income, but, repeated for thousands of high-income couples, it perpetuates financial disparities.
Nobel Foundation praises Golding Work Kudos to them for shedding light on some of the causes of the gender gap, and how difficult some of them are to eradicate. For example, it is not enough for women and men to have the same educational attainment, and today’s wage gap persists even though women outnumber men in college and graduate school.
“She was thrust into these realms of real existence,” Kimbell said. “Greed works and there’s no easy solution – you can’t just build a screen for auditions.”
She added, “Gender equality right now is very much dependent on cultural norms and expectations, and that’s really hard to address.”
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