On the afternoon of October 9th Beijing time, the list of Nobel laureates in economics was announced, and the award was awarded to Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University, in recognition of her "enhanced understanding of the outcomes of the female labor market.
Golding's research covers a wide range of topics, including female labor, gender disparities in income, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Her research mostly interprets the present from a past perspective and explores the origins of current concerns.
Claudia Golding is also the first woman in the economics department of Harvard University to receive a tenured teaching position. In her new book "Career or Family? - Women's Centennial Journey towards Equality", she divides the group of women who have received university education from the early 20th century to the present into five groups and delves into their ideal aspirations and obstacles encountered in reality, such as career, marriage, and children, as well as their intergenerational evolution.
In the book, Golding proposed that balancing family responsibilities and career development has always been a focus of social attention. However, it is deeply regrettable that even in developed countries, women seem to always strive for a balance between career and family. Inequality, like two sides of a coin, exists in both career and family. If equality within the family is achieved, gender income equality in work will have a greater chance of achieving it. Women have reduced their careers as part of a rational response from families to the labor market. But the good news is that technological innovation and progress can help women gain more equal rights in the workplace and at home.
Career or Family? - Women's Centennial Journey towards Equality
By Claudia Golding
Translated by Yan Jinyu and Yan Chaofan
Published by CITIC Publishing Group
What can we do in the face of inequality?
The other side of gender inequality is actually family inequality.
Why can't dual worker families equally share the joy and responsibility of raising children? They can also do this, but it's equivalent to giving up their existing income - it's a considerable amount of money. Couples with half responsibility may be happier, but they may also be poorer.
Under the "greedy work" structure, men start a family and get promoted because women give up their careers and devote more time to their families. But in fact, both sides have been deprived of their rightful share. Men are deprived of the warmth to participate more in family affairs, while women are deprived of the opportunity to better develop their careers.
So, what should we do?
Firstly, every couple must make independent decisions to achieve more equality. Every lover should know that the happiness of love depends on the minimum level of happiness of one spouse.
A long time ago, there was a female student in my class who left a deep impression on me. At that time, my thinking on the issue of equality was far less profound than it is now. I asked students in the classroom what kind of future they wanted. I think in the present, they would all say they hope to work on Wall Street, but about 25 years ago, this girl said, the most important thing is to find a partner that matches your expectations.
The second point is to make social and institutional changes to help couples achieve the first point more easily. Because it is obvious that when the rewards of 'greedy work' are abundant, couples are in a sense attracted to this division of labor. In the end, women will step back from their careers and contribute more to their families.
So, how can we change the market? This is of course more difficult and involves making flexible office work easier to achieve. The COVID-19 since 2020 has actually brought a glimmer of hope to this problem. In many ways, the cost of flexible office has decreased.
Any solution must involve reducing the cost of comfort and time flexibility discussed. The simplest way is to create a perfect substitute for oneself. Using technology to transmit information to a perfect substitute, but ensuring that it does not cause distortion. The substitutability between workers is the key to reducing excessive hourly wages for long-term and on-demand work. If two employees can replace each other well or even perfectly, then when one of them has to take a vacation, the other can seamlessly take over the former's position. Customers, patients, students, and customers can be transferred from one skilled employee to another without losing information, changing trust, or creating efficiency differences.
We can also create effective alternative teams, as we have done in certain health professions where the cost of professionals is already high, to the point where work units also hope for alternative teams. Pediatrics is a great example. Pediatricians have established a rotating team to ensure that they do not need to be on call all the time. Veterinarians and anesthesiologists have also done the same thing.
Is this commercializing important professions? Perhaps. But some of the highest paid and well trained professional jobs operate in this way. When you undergo surgery, you may have been communicating with your surgeon for several months, but only encounter the anesthesiologist responsible for maintaining your life 7 minutes before the surgery. An anesthesiologist is a group practitioner who has a contractual relationship with a surgeon or hospital and only needs to be assigned based on the needs of a single surgery.
The long road to the future must include reducing the cost of flexibility, and may also involve some restructuring of work. This is not a zero sum game.
Gender equality is not just about women.
It is unfair for a man to be on call at work and a woman to be on call at home. When the cost of flexibility decreases, we will address this issue and achieve gender equality and marital equality, but this requires men to demand greater time flexibility and more control over work hours. We need men to lend a helping hand at work, encourage male colleagues to take parental leave, vote in support of public policies that subsidize childcare, and help companies change their greedy work practices, making them understand that family is more valuable than work.
As more and more women aspire to have careers, families, and marital equity, and more and more couples find ways to cope with the time needs of conflicts, we urgently need to understand the practical implications of gender disparities for the economy and society, in order to find solutions, bridge the gap, and make everyone's work and life more fair.
In the face of people's desire for career, family, and fairness, there is no simple solution. However, by ultimately understanding the problem and naming it correctly, we will be able to open up a better direction for the future.
Author: [US] Claudia Golding
Editor: Jiang Chuting
Editor in charge: Zhu Zifen