Books by Claudia Goldin

“Claudia Goldin is an economist, in fact the first female economist ever to get tenure at Harvard. Career & Family is a book everyone should read because it analyses an issue that affects many of us: the wide disparities in pay that develop after people have children. The fact is, it’s very hard to both care for kids and be at the top of your profession. In the economy, the highest paying jobs go to workers who are prepared to work crazy hours and are available 24/7: they either don’t have children or have someone else who is prepared to look after them. This, Goldin has long argued, is the reason women with college degrees still earn so much less than men, especially in jobs like law and investment banking. It’s not so much about sexism or women being worse at bargaining for higher pay than men (say), it’s about a system. If that structure isn’t changed, no number of workshops training people to be less sexist, better at negotiating etc. is going to make a difference. This book is full of data looking at different cohorts of American women through the 20^th century, though I love that there are also lots of examples of what prominent women did regarding marriage and children. Goldin remains outraged at the current situation but is also at pains to show that women have come a long way: a century ago, women who had a career did not, in general, get married and have children, now they can have both (even if they’re paid less for their efforts).” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books of 2021

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“Goldin is a very influential economist. She wrote this article for her presidential address to the American Economic Association. What she said was that women earn less than men because they desire ‘certain amenities’ at work, by which she means flexibility. Her argument is that women are earning less than men because they are paying a price for that flexibility…The flexibility she talks about is the number of hours of work, the precise time of work, the predictability of work and of travel, and the ability to schedule one’s own hours…Flexible work allows part-time work…She is arguing that, in order for women to earn salaries more like men’s, the entire workplace is going to have to be changed…I disagree with her about government regulation. I think that if we had a national policy of paid leave for new parents—men and women—that would go a long way toward providing some of the flexibility that is needed. And if we had a national childcare system, where childcare would be subsidised for people who can’t afford it, and we knew that it was high quality, with trained childcare workers who are reasonably paid, that would go a long way toward making it possible for women to stay in the workplace and to take jobs that are perhaps less flexible on a daily basis.” Read more...

The best books on Women and Work

Myra Strober, Economist