Comment: Economics Nobel highlights issues of working women

By Sarah Green Carmichael / Bloomberg Opinion

When I saw the news that Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin had won the Nobel Prize for economics, I was just taking my first sip of black coffee. “That’s well-deserved,” I thought, reading that although she was the third woman to win the prize, she was the first to win it solo.

Then, “I should write about this.” My still-caffeineless brain lurched into action, with a few gray cells beginning to outline a draft while the rest catalogued everything about my morning that could be shifted (meetings, laundry, my own breakfast) and everything that could not (diaper changes, day care drop off, my toddler’s breakfast).

Goldin is best known for her work on women’s careers and how they can be derailed by marriage and motherhood. I felt hyperaware, in that moment, of my competing devotions: Working and mothering. How quickly could I write this piece? Only as quickly as my maternal duties would allow. The irony tasted as bitter as the coffee.

It’s an especially apt time for the Nobel Committee to recognize Goldin’s work. In the U.S., a post-pandemic rebound in women’s workforce participation rate has narrowed the gap between the genders to the smallest on record. This has come as a pleasant surprise after a steep decline in 2020, when the female-dominated service sector was hammered by covid closures, and schools and day cares sent children home. Women’s workforce resilience can be attributed in part to a strong economy (despite constant prognostications of a coming recession), schools and day cares reopening (the latter in part due to government aid that’s just expired), and rising wages (which compensate for high day-care costs).

Also vitally important: The greater flexibility offered by employers in 2022 and 2023. Women have always needed a bit more wiggle room to earn a living outside the home because most of the responsibility of running a household and raising the next generation falls to them.

Goldin’s work has long illustrated the importance of flexibility to mothers’ earning power. She has studied women’s labor on a sweeping, epic scale; scanning decades of history like a drone camera surveying the Okavango Delta in a wildlife documentary. She has also zoomed in tight, like a microscope, on individual professions.

We know from her research that what we now call “remote work” has long been a key part of women’s ability to contribute to the economy. When the industrial era called workers into factories and offices, women’s involvement in the formal economy started to decline. Pre-19th century, when more work happened at home, more women participated. Seen that way, the remote work of the covid era is not an ” aberration” as some CEOs have labeled it, but a regression toward the mean.

Other research by Goldin has found that women’s wages have increased when the work is redesigned to offer both flexibility and substitutability. Her classic example is pharmacists. Back when more pharmacies were independent, the pharmacist had to always be on call and most pharmacists were men. But the rise of chain drugstores meant that pharmacists could work in shifts, subbing in for each other as needed. The result is that today, pharmacists have one of the smallest gender-wage gaps among high-earning fields. It’s also a field that’s now majority female.

Given that so many jobs have long denied workers both substitutability and flexibility, couples have had to make difficult decisions. Here, Goldin has shown that it’s usually wives who are willing to sacrifice their careers for their husbands’ jobs. The reverse is not often true. “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity,” she told The New York Times. That’s among the reasons I and so many other writers keep coming back to the gender gap in household labor and caregiving. There are many ways that work can shift around a child’s schedule, and not nearly so many ways that a child can shift around a work schedule.

And as Goldin told Harvard Business Review’s Women at Work podcast in 2021, the highest-paying jobs today tend to be time-greedy; they require work on evenings and weekends, often on an unpredictable schedule. In such jobs, “doubling the number of hours more than doubles the earnings,” and often leads to even larger deferred earnings; “you make partner, you get tenure, you get that important first promotion.” Many time-greedy jobs are still dominated by men, often enabled by wives who handle the home front. But, Goldin argued, managerial innovation could allow workers to substitute for each other to make these jobs more mother-friendly. “The firm, given the incentives, can always find a way to have good substitutes.” The problem is that so many senior executives simply don’t see it that way.

That’s become depressingly clear this year, with so many leaders wresting back the flexibility that so many people, and working mothers in particular, have come to rely on to preserve our earning power (not to mention our sanity).

Who knows why the Nobel Committee awards these prizes when they do. Goldin’s work was worthy long before 2023. But there’s perhaps no better time to recognize her body of work than right now.

Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and editor. Previously, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review.