Research shows women get paid less because mothers want flexibility
Timothy P. Carney
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If you study or write about family, gender, and employment, you will find yourself relying again and again on the research of economist Claudia Goldin. Goldin has been prolific, rigorous, and groundbreaking in her research on women and work, which makes it unsurprising that she won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday.
Goldin’s research and writing paint a history of rising and falling gender inequality when it comes to work and wages. It’s one of the most important stories of our time because it tells us something about work, family, and gender, but also because the responses to Goldin’s research show us something about our attitudes toward these things.
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The wage gap between women and men is almost entirely due to the fact that women with children demand flexibility — in when, where, and how much they work — more than men or women without children.
Goldin wrote in an article in the American Economic Review, “The gap exists because hours of work in many occupations are worth more when given at particular moments and when the hours are more continuous.”
She found that the pay gap between men and women was much smaller in industries in which flexibility was the norm (computer programmers, for instance, often just have to meet deadlines rather than be in the office at particular times), and it was much higher in industries that demand face time with bosses, and not only long hours worked, but worked at specific hours.
Goldin argued: “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.”
This tells us something about employer attitudes: Employers value 50 hours a week from a worker more than twice as much as they value 25 hours a week. Employers value a 9-to-5, five-days-a-week worker more than they value someone who puts in 40 hours at her own pace.
Maybe those employers are wrong about the economics. Certainly, in some cases, those employers are right. What’s most interesting here is not the calculation of employers but the calculation of mothers. What Goldin is describing is a pay gap rooted in choice. It’s not that women choose to get paid less, but economics is all about trade-offs and priorities. It turns out that even in the 21st century, mothers prioritize flexibility more than other workers do. Mothers trade some pay for some flexibility.
That’s a conclusion that sticks in the craw of the average non-economist feminist. “She appears to see the fact that women are still the default caretakers in their families as a genuine choice,” feminist reviewer Bryce Covert objected in the liberal magazine the Nation.
The simple feminist account is that women get paid less because their bosses are sexists who discriminate. Goldin’s research undermined that claim because it found that the pay gap shrinks to about zero in more flexible fields.
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I agree with Goldin that employers should be more accommodating of parents’ need for flexibility. I also agree that fathers should be good allies in the workplace by openly valuing family over work and demanding flexibility to be with their children.
But Goldin’s research and my own values clash with the feminism of the Nation, in which it’s unfathomable that mothers might be uniquely apt to value children over pay.