What Do Women Really Want?

It turns out that there is more to the pay differential between men and women than sexism and other forms of discrimination. The problem, Harvard professor Claudia Goldin explains, is what she calls “greedy jobs.”

Evidently, the term is not designed to be a compliment. It refers to jobs that require more time, more engagement and being more on call. Before looking at Goldin’s argument, we must note that we have heard this argument before. Claire Cain Miller wrote about it in the The New York Times. Better yet, I reported on it for this blog. Link here. I have not read Goldin's book, but I am confident that she referenced Cain Miller.

Cain Miller explained that some jobs-- like partner in a law firm-- require you to be on call, all the time, nights and weekends included. It is difficult to do this while caring for a young child. And most childcare is provided by women, who are also called mothers.

Goldin thinks that it’s a problem needing to be solved. If reality does not conform to her ideological predilections, they reality must be modified.

The Daily Mail has the story:

Claudia Goldin, who taught Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, outlines her argument in her new book, Career & Family, which draws on research to show that highly-paid 'greedy jobs' in City law, banking and politics force women to choose between their careers and families once they become mothers.  

The term 'greedy job' describes 'a certain type of "beck and call" job, which pays over the odds for extensive travel, unpredictable, inflexible hours and demanding client facetime,' The Times explains. 

Such jobs do exist. They pay very well. They require a lot of time and attention. They do not correlate with motherhood. So, the problem is babies. In truth, for certain ideologues, the problem has always been babies. Thus, the importance of abortion rights as a political issue. For the record, Goldin apparently does not consider that women can solve the problem by not having babies:

'Men and women have fairly equal pay trajectories until babies come along,' the article notes. 'Because women tend to marry men a little older, and so ahead of them on the pay scale, it is logical for the wife to step back.' 

Goldin, who focuses on college-educated women, writes 'gender norms that we have inherited get reinforced in a host of ways to allot more of the childcare responsibilities to mothers, and more of the family care to grown daughters'. 

It is still more common for women to make this compromise and step back from their 'greedy' careers than men.  

Of course, unless you are an ideological fanatic, you will understand that there is a lot more to the issue than gender norms. There is the reality of human biology, reality that makes women more important as caregivers for small children.

Research has shown not only that women have more empathy, thus a greater capacity for reading infant’s facial expressions and crying. It has also shown that a mother’s voice is the most important sound in the universe for a young child.

Making this a question of gender norms is disingenuous, and blind.

Goldin has concluded that the famous pay gap has not been caused by sexism. I am sure you feel relieved:

Goldin also picks apart the other factors commonly blamed for the pay gap, including sex discrimination, gender bias and a glass ceiling, and notes the arguments are not supported by the data.  

'Data now shows that true pay and employment discrimination, while they matter, are relatively small,' Goldin writes... 'So why do earnings differences persist when gender equality at works seems to finally be within our grasp, and at a time when more professions are open to women than ever before?

'Are women actually receiving lower pay for equal work? By and large, not so much anymore. Pay discrimination in terms of unequal earnings for the same work accounts for a small fraction of the total earnings gap. Today the problem is different.

'Some attribute the gender earnings gap to "occupational segregation" - the idea that women and men are self-selecting, or being railroaded into, certain professions that are stereotypically gendered (such as nurse versus doctor, teacher versus professor) and that those chosen professions pay differently.'

However this only accounts for 'at most a third of the difference in earnings between men and women'. 

'Thus, we empirically know that the lion’s share of the pay gap comes from something else... We must give the problem a more accurate name: "greedy work".'

However there is a tentative silver lining: the pandemic has curbed the demands 'greedy' employers can put on their employees. This has coincided with an uptick in the number of women employed full-time.   

While I have not read Goldin’s book, I would add another question. How many women really want to have those greedy jobs? How many of them, given the choice, would spend more time away from their children? How many of them would like to be on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week? How many of them want to disrupt their children's routines by traveling for business all the time?

Obviously, people who are ideologically committed do not deal with reality, not with the reality of human biology, not with the demands of childrearing, and not with the wishes of real women.