Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity

If you consider yourself a woman and want equal pay, it is better to be a pharmacist than a lawyer. To make partner, the private law firm rewards on-call availability for clients who demand specific attorneys; billing structures up the per-hour rate when an associate clocks more hours, while penalizing part-time and interrupted employment. A decade from their degree, women lawyers earn only seventy-eight cents to the dollar received by their male counterparts, and more of them migrate to jobs in the public or nonprofit sectors. By contrast, the rise of the corporate drugstore, standard medicines, and digital record keeping has made pharmacists interchangeable with each other. Though feminization had nothing to do with these changes, according to economic historian Claudia Goldin, women pharmacists have benefited from standardization: their incomes are generally greater than other women professionals and nearly the same as men, especially when measuring hourly wages. For Goldin, the culprit is not discrimination, especially since the demise of nepotism and other legal restrictions on women's work. It isn't corporate capitalism—after all, women pharmacists improved their standing laboring for branches of national companies. Rather, it is “greedy work,” a time bind that Arlie Hochschild highlighted nearly a quarter century ago, that Goldin finds upending the progressive story she charts on “women's century-long journey toward equity” (9). This subtitle expands the subject of the dismal science's economic man but falls short as an intersectional tale by focusing on college-educated, mostly white women's quest to combine “career and family.”This book is about choice—and overcoming most barriers to women's march through the professions, from feminized and lower-paid ones, like teaching and nursing, to male-dominated ones, like STEM, health, and finance. Goldin adheres to the Gary Becker school, which views households as rational actors that opt for specialization when it comes to caring for children and the elderly. “Greedy work,” she argues, “means that couple equity has been and will continue to be jettisoned for increased family income” because norms and socialization lead women in heterosexual households to take on more flexible and shortened schedules to be available for care (10). Those in professions like accounting and academia face the prospect of ending up with less prestigious or worse jobs if they fail to make partner or gain tenure within the specified time. Goldin assumes that the structure of work, which she rightly identifies as a problem, hasn't already evolved when in fact it has. All workers, including the creative classes, face less stability. Employees experience reclassification as managers, intensified contracting out, and contingent positions that push them outside labor standards and establish barriers to unionization and collective action. As any recent PhD in history knows, the academic workplace is no exception to these trends.Goldin depends on data sets sampled to catch the college educated, some generated from surveys of Harvard graduates. Occasionally she conflates the growing percentage of college-educated women with other women, but she rarely addresses the broader problem of juggling employment with family labor faced by those with even fewer resources or prospects. She defines family “as having a child—including by adoption—but not necessarily a spouse” and a career “as a long-lasting, sought-after employment for which the type of work . . . often shapes one's identity” (21). But hers is no dry economic treatise. She enlivens graphs and charts with engaging vignettes of high-achieving women as well as hypothetical case studies, some with characters drawn from popular culture—projecting the career trajectories of Perry Mason and Della Street, for example, from the 1950s into the 2000s, when Della “could become a Perry Mason herself—she just wouldn't be paid like him, yet. (And she likely wouldn't have a secretary as smart and savvy as Perry was privileged to have as his sidekick)” (177). She introduces her own experience becoming one of the few women in the 1970s tenured in economics, with a husband and dog but no children, having a career but not a family.Dividing the century into five demographic cohorts, Goldin offers a structural analysis grounded in the opportunities and legal and social constraints college-educated women faced in having children and pursuing a profession. Group 1, graduating college from 1900 to 1920, had a family or a career. Group 2, with degrees from 1920 to 1945, took jobs but later left them to have children—with careers disrupted by the Great Depression. In college from 1946 to 1965, Group 3—the subjects of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique—had families, then jobs, but often not careers; they benefited from legal changes but experienced soaring rates of divorce and found years out of the labor force hampered earnings. Goldin convincingly critiques Friedan by offering a longer time frame to suggest that the past was not better and even Friedan's generation was in the middle of a journey to greater equality when captured by The Feminine Mystique. Those in group 4, the women's liberation cohort in college from 1965 to 1975, postponed children for career, with some waiting too long. Group 5, college starters in the 1980s, took advantage of new reproductive technologies to delay childbearing as they aspired to have it all. Throughout the century, Black women maintained their labor force participation even after children.Goldin crafts a progress narrative in which each cohort sought to overcome earlier constraints. Technological determinism pervades her analysis, with opportunities expanded from changes in household appliances, commodification of housework, and enhanced reproductive technologies. Finishing this study during the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldin asks that we “make certain that they [women] do not sacrifice their jobs because of care issues and that they do not sacrifice their caregiving for their jobs” (222). She passes “the baton” to men: “to lean out at work, support their male colleagues who are on parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways” (18, 235). Such reforms may increase equity for the better-off, but are unlikely to upend larger inequalities.