Women in Economics: Claudia Goldin on Family Economics

Claudia Goldin:

Men think that economics is about finance, and so they take economics. Women think economics is about finance, so they don't take economics.

Bruce Edwards:

Claudia Goldin is a pioneer in the field of gender economics. Her influential books and articles have helped us all better understand the role of women in the field and why there are so few of them.

Claudia Goldin:

When we ask women why they don't want to major in economics and why they want to major in psychology, which is the field that they're drawn to more, they will say economics is not about people, and psychology is about people.

Well, we have to do better in teaching people that economics is about people.

Bruce Edwards:

Well, for Goldin, it's also sometimes about dogs.

Claudia Goldin:

Well, I also train...

Rhoda Metcalfe:

You train dogs as well?

Claudia Goldin:

My own dog.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, that's interesting. What kind of dog do you have?

Claudia Goldin:

A golden. What else would I have? (laughter)

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Of course. Of course. (laughter)

Bruce Edwards:

Claudia Goldin is a labor economist and an economic historian, and currently Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Rhoda Metcalfe sat down with Claudia Goldin to discuss her work and how she came to write the definitive book on the economics of family.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

You've done research in a lot of different areas, but you're particularly well known for your work on gender economics. And in your latest book that's called Career and Family, you zero in on the wage gap between men and women, and you offer a different explanation than we normally hear, that a lot of the wage gap is...

Essentially, it's the price women are paying for flexibility in work. Can you dig into that for us?

Claudia Goldin:

So there are differences in earnings and in careers between men and women. These differences have narrowed considerably, but they still exist, and they're troubling. And they're so troubling that we blame them on a lot of things. We want to find what's doing it. We want to find the criminal, so we point fingers, we point fingers at managers who are biased. And I often say... As a New Yorker, I would say we should stamp it out like cockroaches, and we should get the great exterminator and get rid of it. And if we did that, we would be in a better place, but we would not have eradicated the gender differences and earnings and careers that we see around us.

And we would not be in the better place that we thought that we were going to be. And the reason largely is due to the fact that there is the need for caregiving. And caregiving is for children, and caregiving is for other family members. It can be a parent. It could be a spouse. And women do that more than men do that. Thank goodness we see around as, at least I do in my little bubble here in Cambridge, of more men taking on these activities, but it's still the case that women do them. And because of that, women tend to take jobs that enable them to do them. We call that the more flexible job. Now, if both men and women both took the flexible job, we wouldn't have as big a problem. But the problem that we have is that in the universe of jobs, there are jobs that I call greedy jobs. And the greedy jobs pay a lot more.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

When you talk about greedy jobs, what do you mean?

Claudia Goldin:

So a greedy job is a job in which you're supposed to respond late at night or on weekends or take off that vacation.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

So basically, it's a job that takes up a lot of your life.

Claudia Goldin:

And it takes up a lot of your life. And it's a job for which if you couldn't give it all of your life, then you wouldn't be in the job for a long time. You wouldn't be promoted.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Right. And so the idea is that not a lot, not so many women are going into these greedy jobs, precisely because they can't do those kind of hours because they have kids to take care of or somebody to take care of.

Claudia Goldin: That's right.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Right. So how do we narrow that gap? If in fact gender discrimination is only a part of the wage gap, and another part of this is just the fact that so many women are taking the flexible jobs, how do we narrow that gap?

Claudia Goldin:

So there are lots of different ways in which it can be narrowed. So it could be done by having substitutes. So if you are a pediatrician, you have a very greedy job. You have a lot of clients who want to see you, and they want to see only you, and they're going to cry and kick and scream because they're three years old, if they don't see you. Well, form a group practice. And in a group practice, there are one of you, two of you. They could be five of you.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Someone can fill in for you very easily.

Claudia Goldin:

That's right.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

And I guess too, part of this also comes down to the dynamic, in a family, how equally shared the responsibilities are within the families.

Claudia Goldin:

That's right. So the second point is there's a need for care, and the second one is who does it. Now, who does? It doesn't necessarily have to be the woman. And I would say that every person I know who has kids in a different sex couple knows this to be the case, that there is couple inequity. It's the woman who takes the flexible job. It's the woman who does more, not a hundred percent, but more of the caretaking- takes more of the caretaking responsibility.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Spends more of the time with the kids, picks the kids up from school, whatever.

Claudia Goldin:

Right. They essentially throw gender equality under the bus with it.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Do you think that the COVID pandemic has nudged the needle on this to a certain extent?

Claudia Goldin:

I certainly do. So what we discovered during the pandemic is that I can shake your hand over Zoom. We can sign that contract. I don't have to go to Zurich to do that, and I don't have to go to Tokyo for the M&A. Well,

that means that the greedy job can be made more flexible. The flexible job can also be made more productive because rather than... So let's say that someone has a flexible job, and it's sort of part time. Well, she's working let's say 25 hours a week, and now she can spend some of those hours working at home and be more productive.

So the flexible job can be more productive. The greedy job could be more flexible. That that's really, I think one of the amazing silver linings to the pandemic.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

So I'm curious about how you came to this focus on gender economics. Because I know you started in sciences, right? You were originally sort of interested in biology, and then you turned towards economics.

Claudia Goldin:

Yeah, this is going way back. (laughs)

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Yeah. I'm thinking just how you even got into economics in the first place instead of your original focus.

Claudia Goldin:

This is my original focus. I'm a detective. I've always been a detective.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

I see.

Claudia Goldin:

And so my detective work originally was in, and this is when I was in high school, was in bacteriology. And I went to Cornell University, but I got extremely bad advice. And so then I realized that I didn't know very much at all, and so I should go into the liberal arts and study more. And that's what I did, and I chanced upon an amazing economist named Fred Khan. And Fred Khan got me involved in the field of regulation industrial organization. And then I went to the University of Chicago to study industrial organization. That's what I started doing. But I think part of it is that I just get interested in lots of different aspects of the world around me, and then I realized that what I really wanted to do was combine my knowledge and love of history with economics.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

You were at the University of Chicago in a really interesting time, sort of the late sixties, and there were incredible economic minds there at the time. Can you remember what that was like, that period?

Claudia Goldin:

It was astounding. The University of Chicago at the time was an intellectual hub. You know, would go into the building and everyone would be around chatting. We graduate students did not have offices. In fact, I joke with my students today, I had a mailbox... that was the A through Ls.

Right.

Claudia Goldin:

They complained that they don't have... They complained that there are mice in their office. We didn't have offices. We didn't even have mailboxes, but we had an active program of seminars. And I did my field exams in industrial organization with George Staller and Ron Coase and Sam Peltzman, and I very much enjoyed that. And then Gary Becker showed up at the University of Chicago, and suddenly the light bulbs turned on in my head. And I met Bob Fogel and took his course, and other light bulbs turned on. And I felt as if every day, I would be filled with interesting ideas from some of the greatest minds. I felt that I should be taking courses every single quarter. I tell my students today, taking a course is a gift. I have worked 40 hours on this class. I am giving it to you in one hour. Isn't that a gift? Take it.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Okay. So then you moved... you're in industrial economics. How did you make that leap into gender economics? How did you get into that?

Claudia Goldin:

Well, I became an economic historian and I studied slavery in the American South. Also, I worked on the cost of the American Civil War. And then I sort of meandered into working on families. So some of what one does is because of the questions that you have in your mind, but also because of what's going on in other fields and in your own field. And in the field of history in the 1970s, it was a period of a lot of work in social history, in the family and the family economy. And I was working on this, and suddenly I realized that there was one person in the family that no one was talking about because there was not very much information about the person, and that was the wife and the mother. That person was completely neglected. So I decided that I would write her history, and that was my book, Understanding the Gender Gap.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

So as you say, as a historian, an economic historian, you really dug into the evolution of women's relationship with work and careers. So you looked at different stages of women's labor over time. And then in the 1970s, you write about how women began to look at work very differently, and how the availability of the pill was a major factor in women changing their relationship with work. So how did that fit together, the changing of the relationship and the impact that birth control had on women in the seventies?

Claudia Goldin:

So relatively reliable and female-controlled contraception is a key. And one of the reasons that it's a key is to think about what one would do in its absence. And in its absence, let's face it, it isn't like you're not having sex. And so the society formed a set of institutions. You were dating someone. Everybody knew you were dating the person. You became pinned. You became engaged. There were a huge number of institutions that tied you or tied him to you. Well, once you do that, the marriage age is lower. It just becomes the expectation. So the age of first marriage for a woman who's graduating college in around 1968 was about 23 years old, a little bit lower than that.

Okay.

Claudia Goldin:

When I tell my students that, they shudder. By 1974, the age of first marriage had increased to about 25 or so. It's a gigantic increase, 25, 26. What that means is a couple of years so that you can go to law school, you can finish law school, you can begin your PhD, you can do an MBA, you can do your medical degree, and you can do it without being married.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

It allowed her a lot more time to study, to begin a career before she had to worry about getting married, and therefore it advanced her economic potential.

Claudia Goldin:

But it did more than that, and it did more than that because it changed society's expectations. They were enabled to look at work in a different way. They were enabled to be able to have what we would consider to be normal social lives, be sexually active, and also pursue an education that was going to be intensive and was going to be for a certain number of years at that critical moment when getting married would've meant tying yourself to an individual who himself might want to be in a different place.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

In past interviews, you've commented on how teaching students has impacted your research. I'm interested in knowing how that has affected your work, but I'm also interested... Given that so much of your work looks at a couple's relationship and how that impacts the work they do, I'm curious about how working with your own life partner, your husband, economist, Lawrence Katz, how that has impacted also on your work.

Claudia Goldin:

I think that you cannot be a good scholar and be solitary, that you have to be out there talking to people. And some of the best people to talk to are your students who are unafraid to ask questions. And I remember when I first came to Harvard, I was told that I could teach any course I wanted to teach. I was never told that before. And so I created a course on women and family and careers, women, work, and family. And it was in that class long, long ago when I first came to Harvard in 1990, but it was in that class that I started thinking about the book that now has become Career and Family.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

But can you remember particular kinds of questions or particular statements that some of your students said that got your brain thinking about it?

Claudia Goldin:

Right. So I asked them. I went around the room and said to them, what would you like from your life partner? And one woman said, and this was so brilliant, she said, "I want a man who wants what I want."

Right.

Claudia Goldin:

So it really is sort of looking in the mirror. And I started putting together this notion that there are these large changes that occurred in the lives of college educated women from the late 19th century to the present. And so that class forced me to think about it. You asked about work with Larry. So when I first met Larry, when I first came to Harvard, I was thinking about shifting from the study of women, which I did to the study of the history of education because no one had written, I thought, a good history of education in America. And in addition, I was interested in the history of inequality because education is sort of a key to mobility. And Larry is the expert on inequality and mobility. And so we came together to write the book, The Race Between Education and Technology.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Working with him has drawn you into other areas or has fast-tracked you into other areas of research?

Claudia Goldin:

I would say that he was drawn into other areas, not me.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, I see. I see.

Claudia Goldin:

I think I've become a much better... There's no question that I'm a better scholar because of Larry.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Is it hard to balance off though? You're in a relationship, but you're also... you have this deep work relationship. Is it hard to keep those two things balanced?

Claudia Goldin:

Well, when we were writing the book, as is often the case in co-authoring something, then the balance is somewhat difficult. But I don't think we have a project together right now, but we teach together. We have two courses that we give together. But I would say that I learn every day from Larry.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

I'm sure he learns from you.

Claudia Goldin:

I hope so. He learns about dogs from me. Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, right, because you're a big dog lover.

Claudia Goldin:

Well, I also train.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, you train dogs as well?

Claudia Goldin:

My own.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

You train your own dog?

Claudia Goldin:

I did competition work with my dog.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, that's interesting. What kind of dog do you have?

Claudia Goldin:

A golden. What else do I have? (laughter)

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Of course. Of course (laughter).

So just the last couple of thoughts... You have been very involved in trying to get more women studying and majoring in economics, and you started this undergraduate Women in Economics program at Harvard, I think something almost 10 years ago now.

Claudia Goldin:

No, it was in the United States. It was not at Harvard.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Oh, it was across the US?

Claudia Goldin:

Yes.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

So how's that working out? How's that battle going? Is the ratio of men to women changing in economics?

Claudia Goldin:

Well, the ratio has changed a bit. I can't say that the program that we put together moved the needle that much, but I think that it has raised the issue, and many, many people have realized that they should change the way economics is taught so that women are more attracted to it. Men think that economics is about finance, and so they take economics. Women think economics is about finance, so they don't take economics. Economics is not about finance. So we had some very light touch interventions. When the freshmen arrive, the freshmen come with their parents. And so you have events in which you showcase your graduates who are in careers that are very diverse.

You have an individual who's at the IMF or an individual at the World Bank, or an individual who's working on obesity or inequality or economic development. And you say, "You see with an economics degree, you can do all these different things. Economics isn't just finance." When we ask women why they don't want to major in economics and why they want to major in psychology, which is the field that they're drawn to more, they will say economics is not about people, and psychology is about people. Well, we have to do better in teaching people that economics is about people.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

Claudia Goldin, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you and dig into some of your work and your life, and I really thank you for taking so much time to speak to me.

Claudia Goldin:

Well, it's been a great joy to do it, a lot of fun. Thanks.

Bruce Edwards:

Claudia Goldin is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She was speaking with Rhoda Metcalfe.

Look for the other podcasts in our Women in Economic series at imf.org/podcasts on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. You can also follow us on Twitter @imf_podcast.

I'm Bruce Edwards.

Rhoda Metcalfe:

And I'm Rhoda Metcalfe. Thanks for listening.