Gender

The old wisdom that the more women pursue a career, the fewer children they bear, has long been shown to be false. In the 1980s, it was true that the higher a country’s female labour force participation rate, the lower its fertility rate. But a decade later, the relationship had flipped: the higher a country’s female labour participation rate, the higher its fertility rate. In some countries, the probability of having a second child is now highest among the professional classes and lowest among the lowest-skilled. In societies where male contributions are minimal, large numbers of women say they do not want another child despite their partner’s wishes. The result is that in countries where men do a third of childcare and housework, total fertility rates are roughly a third higher than in those where they do just a fifth.In the US, between May and December 2020, fathers spent 50 minutes per day in which their primary activity was childcare. During the first year of the pandemic this fell to 46 minutes, while mothers’ daily childcare commitments rose from 88 to 101 minutes. And the “new normal” beginning to take shape has seen US mothers’ labour force participation rates fall, reversing decades-long trends. The participation rate for fathers of young children dipped from 95 to 93.4 per cent in 2020, before recovering slightly to 93.9 last year. Mothers, meanwhile, have fallen from 66.4 to 65.8 per cent in 2020, labour participation rates slid further to 65.6 per cent last year, while in the UK female participation has also dipped slightly.

Change is needed on multiple fronts. Government and company policies must offer more flexibility for all parents. Britons need far more help meeting the country’s world-leading (in a bad way) childcare costs. And men must take their own step back from the office and join their partners in pulling their weight at home. Everyone must shoulder the burden of raising the next generation.

And the “new normal” beginning to take shape has seen US mothers’ labour force participation rates fall, reversing decades-long trends. The participation rate for fathers of young children dipped from 95 to 93.4 per cent in 2020, before recovering slightly to 93.9 last year. Mothers, meanwhile, have fallen from 66.4 to 65.8 per cent in 2020, labour participation rates slid further to 65.6 per cent last year, while in the UK female participation has also dipped slightly.

What’s worrying is that in parts of the west, men have not just been slow to act on this, but the trend has been in the opposite direction. In the US, between May and December 2020, fathers spent 50 minutes per day in which their primary activity was childcare. During the first year of the pandemic this fell to 46 minutes, while mothers’ daily childcare commitments rose from 88 to 101 minutes.

For decades, the assumption has been that when it comes to the workplace, out of sight is out of pocket, but the pandemic has shown otherwise. The new era of flexible working makes the equalisation of parental childcare more feasible than ever.

John Burn-Murdoch, "Men stepping up at home is key to boosting birth rates,"Financial Times, June 16, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/6a6a7695-4756-42d1-b03d-283ad5e57d5f

Men stepping up at home is key to boosting birth rates

When we talk about how to address falling birth rates, it’s not surprising that the conversation usually centres on young women. After all, it’s quite tricky to influence birth rates without them. But according to a growing body of research, this demographic is already doing about as much as they can. A more fruitful policy target may in fact be men.

In the year 2000, there were 22.5 people aged 65 and older for every 100 people of working age in OECD countries. This year, the ratio is estimated to have climbed by almost half to 32.4. Over the same period, the female labour force participation rate climbed steadily from 59 to 65 per cent, and the gender pay gap for workers in OECD countries shrunk from 18 per cent to just under 12 per cent.

The coinciding trends present a conundrum: at a time when some governments are fretting about declining birth rates, the number of women navigating the fraught trade-off between flourishing professionally and having children has never been larger.

A comprehensive new study suggests it is time we stop defaulting to the assumption that job vs family is a trade-off solely for women, and start paying more attention to the role men can play in facilitating simultaneous advances in both birth rates and female employment.

The old wisdom that the more women pursue a career, the fewer children they bear, has long been shown to be false. In the 1980s, it was true that the higher a country’s female labour force participation rate, the lower its fertility rate. But a decade later, the relationship had flipped: the higher a country’s female labour participation rate, the higher its fertility rate. In some countries, the probability of having a second child is now highest among the professional classes and lowest among the lowest-skilled.

Several factors have contributed to this reversal, including improvements in state provision of and support for childcare, but among the biggest shifts has been the increase in paternal contribution to childcare and housework. This makes the trade-off for mothers much less steep.

Having a child is usually dependent on both partners wanting one. Research shows that agreement tends to be much higher where men do relatively high shares of childcare. In societies where male contributions are minimal, large numbers of women say they do not want another child despite their partner’s wishes. The result is that in countries where men do a third of childcare and housework, total fertility rates are roughly a third higher than in those where they do just a fifth.

America is increasingly falling behind its peer nations. In the 1990s, America was a leader in employment levels thanks to its strong economy and relative accessibility to working women. The 2001 recession and the “jobless recovery” that followed knocked America back down to a level more in line with its peer nations—and then the 2008 recession knocked America far behind. Today, Italy—a nation notorious for its perennially broken labor market—is the only member of the G7 with lower prime age employment levels. Countries like Portugal and Japan—which have by no means experienced surges of dynamism or explosive economic growth over the last two decades—have managed to beat out the US and achieve 85% prime age employment rates. Male employment has been declining across advanced economies as men spend more time raising children and employment transitions away from traditionally male-dominated industries like manufacturing. Still, in few countries has the decline been as stark and as dramatic as in the US. Male prime-age employment rates in the US were nearly 10% off all-time-highs in 2009, and still remain 5% below their high-water mark.the majority of flows into employment every month do not come from unemployment but rather from outside the labor force.This is true during all but the very worst recessions (i.e., early 2020), butduring boom times nearly 3/4 of all flows into employment come from outside the labor force. Granted, that’s partially because the number of Americans outside the labor force is just so large (about 100 million people compared to about five million people in unemployment), but it also reveals how rapid growth in employment numbers can occur despite low unemployment numbers. American economic policymaking and punditry has a horrible history of presuming that workers outside the labor force are lost forever. In the 2010s drops in employment for non-college educated people were blamed on a “skills gap”. Drops in employment for young people were blamed on their laziness. Drops in employment for men were blamed on video games. By the late 2010s employment rates had basically recovered to pre-recession levels for all of these groups, proving that it was artificially weak labor demand keeping them out of the workforce.

Joseph Politano, "We Have a Chance to End America's Great Employment Failure,"Apricitas Economics, May 7, 2022, https://apricitas.substack.com/p/we-have-a-chance-to-end-americas

We Have a Chance to End America's Great Employment Failure

Regular readers of Apricitas will know that I focus heavily on the labor market as both an indicator for the state of the US economy and a goal for policymakers to influence. I believe—with good reason—that wages, work, and employment are the most important parts of economic well-being. The labor market is the market of markets—businesses depend on labor for basic function, workers depend on labor income for their consumption, investments require labor to make them valuable, and governments require labor to ensure the functioning of the state. Nearly every firm and household must, at some point, engage with the labor market. So much of prosperity at an individual and household level comes down to your employment, job security, and wages. Indeed, the most powerful countries in the modern world are not the ones with the largest natural resource reserves or the biggest armies but those with the best and most productive workforces.

That is why the last 25 years have been modern history’s biggest tragedy. A series of poor macroeconomic policy choices have resulted in decades of shrinking employment and lost wages across many high income countries—but especially in America. During the late 1990s, America’s labor market was arguably the strongest in the world. The 2001 and 2008 recessions left it permanently scarred—and now America significantly lags many of its peer countries.

For the sake of America’s workers, it must lead again.

America’s Great Employment Failure

Fundamentally, America lacks the institutionalized employment protections that many high-income nations have. When the pandemic struck, countries across Europe used the government’s tab to institute furlough and job retention schemes to keep workers in place despite the economic slowdown. The US has no such capabilities (hence the scramble to implement enhanced unemployment benefits at the start of the pandemic). The end result is that recessions in the US manifest as massive declines in the workforce. Couple that with the relatively weak policy responses to the 2001 and 2008 recessions and you have a situation where labor demand and employment remain artificially low for more than two decades. The good news is that the COVID recession saw by far the strongest and swiftest policy response in American history, allowing employment to recover to pre-pandemic levels in two short years. Still, there are millions of people who could be brought into employment in the next stage of the economic expansion. It will be to America’s great benefit if these people are brought into the workforce.

Idle Hands

Not have a job
Have actively looked for work in the last four weeks
and be currently available for work

Unsurprisingly these qualifications mean that many people who want to work are not counted as unemployed. About five million people are not in the labor force but say they want a job today, and these people are not counted as officially unemployed even though by any colloquial definition they would be considered unemployed. That’s another massive pool of possible workers that could be drawn into employment if labor demand remains strong.

American economic policymaking and punditry has a horrible history of presuming that workers outside the labor force are lost forever. In the 2010s drops in employment for non-college educated people were blamed on a “skills gap”. Drops in employment for young people were blamed on their laziness. Drops in employment for men were blamed on video games. By the late 2010s employment rates had basically recovered to pre-recession levels for all of these groups, proving that it was artificially weak labor demand keeping them out of the workforce. When companies increased their hiring intensity and wages began rising, many of these workers were drawn back into employment. During the pandemic we saw a microcosm of this regarding workers who were pushed into early retirement due to COVID. Policymakers and forecasters worried that these workers were out of the labor market for good, but as COVID abated and labor demand recovered many of these workers have since reentered the workforce. We shouldn’t discount the possibility of future employment gains just because those workers would come from outside the labor force instead of unemployment.

What Could You Do With An Extra $9,600 a Year?

In 2019 Americans earned, on average, about $9,600 less than they would have if growth had continued at the pre-Great Recession pace. Matt Klein puts it best: “Americans have been living below their means—producing, consuming, and investing less than they otherwise could have—for 15 years.” Much of that drop in earnings came from an inability or unwillingness from policymakers in Congress and the Federal Reserve to pursue the kind of aggressively stimulative monetary and fiscal policies that caused the post-COVID employment recovery to be so rapid. Think about all the buildings that went unbuilt, the skills that went undeveloped, and the inventions that went uninvented because America chose to idle tens of millions of workers—its most valuable resources—for decades.

Inflation has, understandably, taken center stage in today’s macroeconomic policy debate. As the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy to reduce inflation, it is likely that the rate of employment growth will also slow. Truth be told, the rate of employment growth was always bound to slow at this point simply because the vast majority of previously-employed people have returned to work. The key remains to balance the need to combat inflation with the need to expand and strengthen America’s workforce. We have an opportunity to end America’s decades long employment failure, and it’s an opportunity we simply can’t afford to pass up.

Twenty-eight percent of Democrats are now college-educated women, an increase from 12 percent in 1998. Men without any college education have increasingly identified as Republican, but by a less substantial degree. Men consistently report greater interest in discussing and paying attention to politics, even if they are slightly less like to vote in elections than women are. Seven in 10 (70 percent) men say they follow news about national politics somewhat or very closely, compared to 57 percent of women. More than four in 10 (42 percent) women, including 60 percent of young women, report that they do not really follow news about national politics. conceptions of sex and sexuality have also undergone drastic changes in recent years. Young people express increasing fluidity in feelings of physical attraction, but these generational differences are much more prevalent among women. Women are more likely than men to report physical attraction to both genders. This is by far most evident among young women. Just over half (56 percent) of women ages 18 to 29 say they are attracted to only men, compared to 83 percent of women ages 65 and older. There are massive gender differences in the consumption of pornography. Men are four times more likely than women to report having watched pornography in the past month (44 percent vs. 11 percent). Men in their 30s and 40s report the most frequent use of pornography A majority (57 percent) of men age 30-49 report having watched pornography in the past month, and 42 percent say they have watched it in the past week. In contrast, 44 percent of young men and only 26 percent of senior men say they have watched pornography at some point during the past month

Daniel A. Cox,Dana Popky and Beatrice Lee, "Politics, Sex, and Sexuality: The Growing Gender Divide in American Life," American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2022, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/politics-sex-and-sexuality-the-growing-gender-divide-in-american-life/

Women...now make up 44% of college-educated workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations. However, a closer look at the underlying data reveals divergent patterns of gender (in)equality within STEM. Men continue to make up the vast majority of degree recipients in STEM fields that are spatially and mathematically intensive — geoscience, engineering, economics, mathematics, computer science, and physical science — while women are overrepresented in life sciences, psychology, and social sciences....In 2017, 49% of all bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering were awarded to women. This number masks substantial gender disparities across fields, however. Women earned two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees in life sciences, psychology and social science fields — 62% in biology, 78% in psychology, and 61% in social science. In contrast,women were only slightly over one quarter of degree recipients in the combined math-intensive fields of geoscience (39%), engineering (22%), economics (32%), mathematics (42%), computer science (19%), and the physical sciences (40%)....Gender disparities within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics bachelor’s degrees have become more pronounced since 2000...Gender differences carry over from education to the STEM workforce.

A leaky pipeline reduces the share of women rising up the ranks of career hierarchy in academia. Women were 45% of junior full-time faculty but only 33% of senior full-time faculty in 2019. However, the pipeline leaks more in fields where women are overrepresented in the lower ranks. In psychology, for instance, the share of women was 68% among junior full-time faculty and 53% among senior faculty, a 15 percentage-point difference. With a 6 percentage-point difference, pipeline leakage is smallest in computer science: the share of women was 25% among junior full-time computer science faculty and 19% among senior faculty. What explains the differences in pipeline leakage by field? It is possible that the smaller number of women who choose to enter the male-dominated fields may be highly positively selected — especially motivated — compared to those who enter the more female-friendly fields. This is consistent with research showing that a large number of female entrants into STEM fields has a negative impact on gender equality in that field in terms of career outcomes. In psychology and the social sciences, it may be that the higher degree of female representation in the lower ranks indicates a shift in the preferences of men: the number of junior male faculty has declined since 1981. This may be due to occupational “tipping”, whereby men start to exit an occupation when the fraction of women in that occupation rises above a certain threshold.

What this Means:

As a smaller proportion of women enter geoscience, engineering, economics, mathematics, computer science, and physical science at the undergraduate level, the career pipeline in these fields will become even smaller. Less gender diversity could be detrimental to the quality and relevance of knowledge generated in these fields, by narrowing the range of ideas generated and reducing success in problem solving. We should then expect the same outcome in life sciences, psychology and social sciences if women continue to saturate them while men exit. A widening of the uneven gender distribution between STEM fields helps perpetuate the gender pay gap. This, in turn, can have negative consequences for gender equality outside the labor market if, for example, lower female-male wage ratios erode women’s decision-making power in the family and reduce women’s well-being.

The share of women holding academic positions has increased substantially but also varies greatly by field. In 2019, women comprised 39% of all academic positions held by science, engineering and health doctorate holders at 2- and 4-year colleges or universities. This reflects a substantial increase from just 9% in 1973 and 22% in 1993. Gender gaps vary noticeably by fields. Women held only 19% of academic positions in engineering, 26% in physical and geosciences, 26% in mathematics and statistics, and 23% in computer science. This is in contrast to 60% of positions in psychology, 47% in life sciences, and 42% in social sciences including economics. Among academic position types, women are more likely than men to hold “other” full-time positions (instructor, adjunct, lecturer, research associate, administrator) as well as post-doc and part-time positions.

The STEM fields in which women are underrepresented typically pay higher salaries than fields with high shares of women. For example, the median salary in 2019 for full-time workers holding the highest degree in their field was $105,000 for computer scientists and $100,000 for engineers, both male-dominated occupations. Among female-heavy occupations, median salary was $74,000 for psychologists and $64,000 for biological, agricultural and environmental scientists.

Gender differences carry over from education to the STEM workforce. While the college-educated STEM workforce had almost reached gender parity in 2019, with a female share of 44%, large gender gaps remain between types of STEM jobs. Although only 29% of the science and engineering (S&E) workforce in 2019 was female, women were 57% of S&E-related workers (e.g. nurse, dental hygienist). The representation of women coincides with the patterns of gender balance in STEM degrees. Women scientists and engineers comprise 48% of biological, agricultural and environmental life scientists, 81% of psychologists, and 64% of social scientists; and much smaller shares of geoscientists (30%), engineers (16%), economists (24%), mathematical scientists (42%), computer scientists (24%), and physical scientists (35%). Even within the S&E-related workforce, women comprise 70% of health-related occupations — such as nurses, pharmacists, and physician assistants — but only 21% of computer and information systems managers.

Female attrition along the STEM educational hierarchy is driven by the very disciplines that, paradoxically, seem to attract large numbers of women at the entry level. In general, women earned a smaller share of doctoral degrees than bachelor’s degrees in 2017, reflecting the well-known leaky pipeline in women’s progress up the career hierarchy. In STEM fields, the pipeline is leakiest in life science, psychology and social science fields, which are female-dominated at the undergraduate level — the female share of degree recipients in these fields was 58% at the doctoral level compared with 66% at the bachelor’s level in 2017. In contrast, the four fields with the lowest female shares among bachelor’s degrees recipients — geoscience, engineering, economics, and computer science — have higher female representation among PhD recipients (see here).

Gender disparities within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics bachelor’s degrees have become more pronounced since 2000. The number of women earning bachelor’s degrees in life sciences, psychology and social sciences grew faster than the number of men since 2000. These fields, which started out with high female shares at the turn of the century, became even more disproportionately represented by women at the undergraduate level. Similarly, even as the numbers of women in many of the STEM fields that started out with a disproportionate representation of men have been increasing, the number of men earning bachelor’s degrees in several of these fields grew faster than the number of women — this trend was most pronounced in computer science and mathematics, while engineering was an exception (see chart).

While women earn close to half of all STEM bachelor’s degrees, there is wide variation in women’s representation across fields. In 2017, 49% of all bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering were awarded to women. This number masks substantial gender disparities across fields, however. Women earned two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees in life sciences, psychology and social science fields — 62% in biology, 78% in psychology, and 61% in social science. In contrast, women were only slightly over one quarter of degree recipients in the combined math-intensive fields of geoscience (39%), engineering (22%), economics (32%), mathematics (42%), computer science (19%), and the physical sciences (40%).

Prathi Seneviratne, "Are Women Reaching Parity with Men in STEM?"Econofact, April 15, 2022, https://econofact.org/are-women-reaching-parity-with-men-in-stem

Are Women Reaching Parity with Men in STEM?

Women have made tremendous gains in education and now make up 44% of college-educated workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations. However, a closer look at the underlying data reveals divergent patterns of gender (in)equality within STEM. Men continue to make up the vast majority of degree recipients in STEM fields that are spatially and mathematically intensive — geoscience, engineering, economics, mathematics, computer science, and physical science — while women are overrepresented in life sciences, psychology, and social sciences. If anything, these gender disparities appear to be widening slightly over time at the undergraduate level, with potential implications for gender differences in employment, pay, academia, and beyond.

The Facts:

Women have made dramatic inroads in education since the 1990s. From making up less than a third of the college-educated workforce in the early 1990s, women have come to surpass men — making up 52% of the workforce with at least a college degree in 2019. The representation of college-educated women in STEM occupations has also been trending upwards since the early 1990s.

Intuitive NBER finds a relationship btw high earning husbands and well educated women’s propensity to work“…The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women’s relative wages are amongst the most notable economic developments of the twentieth century. The growth in these indicators was particularly pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s, but it stalled since the early 1990s, especially for college graduates. In this paper, we argue that the discontinued growth in female labor supply and wages since the 1990s is a consequence of growing inequality. Our hypothesis is that the growth in top incomes for men generated a negative income effect on the labor supply of their spouses, which reduced their participation and wages. We show that the slowdown in participation and wage growth was concentrated among women married to highly educated and high income husbands, whose earnings grew dramatically over this period. We then develop a model of household labor supply with returns to experience that qualitatively reproduces this effect. A calibrated version of the model can account for a large fraction of the decline relative to trend in married women’s participation in 1995-2005 particularly for college women. The model can also account for the rise in the gender wage gap for college graduates relative to trend in the same period…”

The basic story“…The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women’s relative earnings are amongst the most notable economic phenomena of the twentieth century (Goldin (2006)). These trends were particularly pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s, when full-year participation of married women grew from 38% in 1975 to a peak of 60% in 1996 and the male to female ratio in hourly wages dropped from 1.60 to 1.34. Since then, these indicators have stalled, as shown in figure 1. Moreover, this development is particularly pronounced for highly educated women. The labor force participation of married women with college degree and the gender wage gap of college workers saw no improvement since the early 1990s until the Great Recession. These observations are puzzling in light of the continued rise in women’s educational attainment relative to men and their entry into professional high-earning occupations…. We document a break in the trend for the labor force participation rate of married women in the early 1990s. The rate of labor force participation of married women increased by about 2 percentage points per year in the post war period up until this point, with a stronger growth for women with a college degree, converging rapidly to the participation rate of single women in the same education group. This convergence stopped in the early 1990s. The labor force participation rate for single women with less than college was approximately 5 percentage points higher than for married women in this education group in 1993-2007, whereas for women with college degree, the participation rate for single women remained 10 percentage points higher than for married women over the same period. The gap in labor force participation rate between single and married women dropped slightly during the Great Recession, mainly due to a decline in the participation rate of single women, and there was no further convergence after 2012, as the economy recovered. We then examine labor supply and wages of married women by their own and their husbands’ education, as well as their husbands’ income. We find that the decline in the growth of labor force participation of married women is primarily concentrated among those with a college husband and is positively related to husband’s income. Due to positive assortative matching, this channel disproportionally affected women with a college degree. Turning to wages, we find that the growth in top incomes for married men is associated with an increase in the skill premium for this group, whereas there was no comparable increase of the skill premium for married women. We also show that there was no difference in the skill premium by gender for single workers. To reinforce this observation, we examine the evolution of the gender wage gap by educational attainment for married workers. We find that the gender wage gap completely stopped converging for workers with a college degree in the early 1990s, though it declined somewhat after the Great Recession. For non-college workers, the gender wage gap continued closing until the early 2000s, even if the participation of married high school women was also flat over this period….”

This phenomenon accounts for 1/3 of gender wage gap (relative to trend) among college graduates, “…We calibrate the model to match key empirical moments in 1980, such as the distribution of household income and spousal earnings and wives’ labor force participation by household type. We conduct experiments to gauge the quantitative relevance of our hypothesis. Specifically, we increase the exogenous common component of the skill premium to match the observed rise in the male skill premium in the data in the 1990s. Our findings suggest that the rise in the skill premium can account for more than half of the decline relative to trend in married women’s participation in 1995-2005, and more than two thirds of the decline for college women. The model can also account for one third of the rise in the gender wage gap for college graduates relative to trend in the same period….”

The supporting Evidence

“…Figure 2 illustrates the joint evolution of labor force participation for married women and the gender wage gap by educational attainment.As shown in Panel (A), the labor force participation of married women with a college degree has mostly stalled since the early 1990s, with a small transitory increase for college workers during the Great Recession. For high school women, the growth in participation drops substantially starting in the early 1990s, but is still mostly positive. High school women also experience a temporary surge in participation during the Great Recession, after which their participation declines. Albanesi (2019) shows that female labor supply displays a strong countercyclical component, interpreted as resulting from household insurance against the risk of earnings loss of their male partners, who are more sensitive to business cycle risk. Ellieroth (2019) finds that temporary rise in female labor force participation during recessions results from a decline in the employment to non-participation flow of married women. We focus most of our analysis on the years previous to the Great Recession, to avoid the effect of this major cyclical event. Turning to the gender wage gap, measured as the male to female ratio of hourly earnings, Panel (A) shows that for college workers it decreased rapidly until 1992 and it stalled during the 1990s and early 2000s, only reaching values lower than those in 1992 after the Great Recession. A similar but less stark pattern occurred for high school workers, as shown in Panel (B). As shown in figure 3, panel (A), the flattening of labor force participation starting in the early 1990s is limited to married women. Participation of single women has been mostly stable throughout the sample period. Panel (B) shows the labor force participation rates of married women by age groups. One striking observation from these figures is that prime age married women have lower participation rates than older women, suggesting that the aging of the population is not related to this phenomenon…”

“..We first consider changes in fertility. Women with children are less likely to participate in the labor force, and hence increases in fertility could reduce labor force participation of married women. However, we can rule out this explanation as the only cause of the observed behavior of female labor force participation. As shown in figure 9, the decline in the growth rate of labor force participation was similar for women with and without children. Most importantly, the evolution in the labor force participation of married women depends on the characteristics of their spouse, since the decline in the rate of growth of participation was largest for women married to men in the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution, followed by those married to men in the 50thpercentile and in the 10th percentile. We conclude from this pattern that changes in fertility are not the main driving force behind the observed change in participation trends….”

"…In this paper, we study declines in women’s labor force participation by race and ethnicity as well as the presence of children. We find that increases in labor force exits were larger for Black women, Latinas, and women living with children. In particular,we find larger increases in pandemic-era labor force exits among women living with children under age 6 and among lower-earning women living with school-age children after controlling for detailed job and demographic characteristics. Latinas and Black women also had larger increases in labor force exits during the pandemic relative to White women. Differences in the presence of children and household structure explain one-quarter of the excess labor force exits among women of color.... Table 3, which displays coefficients from our models on indicators for identifying as a certain race or ethnicity, shows that covariates can explain about two-thirds of increased exits for Latinas and a little less than one-half of the excess exits for Black women. Columns 1 and 2 show specifications where all exits are the dependent variable. In these specifications, Latinas had a 6.0 percentage point higher rate of exits compared with White women without including controls and a 2.4 percentage point higher exit rate after including controls shown in column 2 of table 2. Black women had a 4.0 percentage point higher exit rate without controls and a 2.9 percentage point higher exit rate with controls. Similar disparities and reductions upon including controls apply for exits attributed to caregiving in columns 3 and 4. When examining differences in exits combined with an interest in working, we see that Latinas are 2.5 percentage points more likely than White women to have exited the labor force, but are interested in work and Black women are 2.4 percentage points (column 5). With controls, these differences fall to statistically insignificant 1.5 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points, respectively. Increases in labor force exits were also larger among Latinas and Black women during the pandemic relative to White women..."

Katherine Lim and Mike Zabek, "Women's Labor Force Exits during COVID-19: Differences by Motherhood, Race, and Ethnicity," Federal Reserve, October 2021, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/womens-labor-force-exits-during-covid-19-differences-by-motherhood-race-and-ethnicity.htm

"... As we show in figure 2, women in households with young and schoolage children saw larger and more sustained participation declines than women without children under age 13 in their household. In June of 2021, labor force participation rates among women in households with children aged 6 to 12 were 3 percentage points lower than in January 2020, while women in households with children aged 0 to 5 saw a 2 percentage point decline. The plot also demonstrates the wide temporal variation in participation that existed even before the pandemic, particularly for women with young children...."

"... As we show in figure 1, these employment losses translated into higher percentagepoint declines in labor force participation among prime-working-age Black women and Latinas relative to White women. The initial decline in labor force participationamong these groups was more than 4 percentage points, while White women experienced a decline of around 2 percentage points, and Asian women saw no decline in labor force participation. In the fall and winter of 2020, Black women saw an increase in their labor force participation, while participation among Latinas remained persistently lower. While men of color also experienced large declines in both employment and labor force participation early in the pandemic, labor force participation changes among men of different races and ethnicity converged beginning in the fall of 2020...."

Summary statistics, "...Table 1 shows averages and standard deviations for our outcome variables and covariates collected in the CPS. To show how differences in covariates could contribute to varying levels of exits during the pandemic, table 1 presents statistics for all women (overall) and then breaks out statistics for Latinas, Black women, and White women who were employed before the pandemic. The first two rows of table 1 show that 8 percent of women left the labor force in 2020 after being previously employed and that 5 percent did so and named caregiving as a reason. Women attributed more than one-half of labor force exits to caregiving, highlighting the importance of childcare and schooling disruptions during the pandemic. Latinas were especially likely to name caregiving, both in terms of having the highest overall proportion of exits attributed to childcare and these exits making up a high proportion of all exits. Around 3 percent of women who were previously employed exited the labor force but expressed interest in working. Like exits overall, the percentages were higher for Latinas and Black women relative to White women. These figures represent increases when compared with previous years. During the pandemic, there was a 1.7 percentage point rise in the overall share of women previously employed who, while out of the labor force, responded that they wanted a job or planned to look for work in the next year-from 1.3 to 3.0 percent of all prime-working-age women.10 Consistent with the patterns of labor force exit, the increases were larger for Black women and Latinas who saw a 3.1 percentage point and 3.0 percentage point increase in the share out of the labor force but indicated interest in working, respectively. Women living with children under age 13 had around a 3.2 percentage point increase in the share who exited the labor force but expressed interest in working compared with a 1 percentage point increase among women with no children under age 13 in the household.11 Latinas, in particular, also had covariates that predicted much more severe labor market impacts of COVID-19. Table 1 shows that Latinas were employed in occupations and industries that had larger employment declines, lower prevalences of remote working, and higher shares of workers who lost work as a result of the pandemic. Around 15 percent of Latinas had less than a high school degree, compared to 5 percent of Black women and 2 percent of White women. Additionally, Latinas earned an average weekly wage of $780 compared with $1,040 for White women. Latinas are also more likely to be living with children compared with other groups of women. Black women also had covariates predicting more severe impacts, though to a smaller degree than for Latinas. Table 1 shows that the average predicted occupational job loss for a Black woman was 23 percent, compared with 24 percent for a Latina and 19 percent for a White woman. Black women were also less likely than White women to be in occupations and industries where working from home as a result of COVID-19 was common. Black women also earn substantially less and have lower average levels of education compared with White women, and they are less likely to be married..."

New Winship on declining LFP, finds that pay hasn't declined, nor has pay lagged productivity (though median pay has lagged productivity growth) implies decline in LFP is driven by other factors (cultural, transfers though he doesn’t attempt to quantify those drivers) Key chart, “…Rather than showing trends in hourly wages,Figure 11 displays the trend in median annual earnings. Line 1 shows the trend in annual wage and salary income among those who have no self-employment earnings. From 1973 to 2019, the increase in the annual median was 6 percent, compared with a 5 percent rise in the median hourly wage of prime-age men. Adding nonwage compensation (Line 2) leads to a 14 percent increase (compared with 12 percent for hourly compensation). It turns out that adding the self-employed (and their earnings) to this sample does not change that conclusion: median annual compensation (Line 3) rises 13 percent.56 At the 10th percentile (not shown), annual compensation (including the earnings of the self-employed) rose 4 percent, compared with 10 percent for the 10th percentile of hourly compensation among employees. In this case, lower annual compensation compared to the hourly measure is likely because more workers at the 10th percentile do not work consistently throughout the year or work fewer hours overall. A final criticism of the trends shown in this section is that we cannot observe the compensation of non-working prime-age males who have dropped out of the labor force. It may be that the only reason compensation seems to have risen is because would-be workers with low compensation are more likely to drop out of the data. In this telling, demand for less-skilled workers may have fallen, but the charts above fail to show it because they only look at men who continue to work. Line 4 of Figure 11 attempts to address this criticism by displaying a counterfactual trend. Respondents in the Current Population Survey data who did not work in the previous year are asked why they did not work. The possible answers include inability to find work, being sick or disabled, taking care of home or family, going to school, retirement, being in the Armed Forces, or “other.” Imagine that nonworking men who were disabled, sick, retired, or said they were nonworking for ‘other’ reasons not listed did not become a larger group between 1973 and 2019 relative to workers. Further, imagine that all these additional men who would have been working would have been below-median workers had they held down jobs. Finally, imagine that in every year all men with no earnings who said they could not find work had worked at below-median compensation. Line 4 in Figure 11 attempts to say what the trend in prime-age male compensation would have been under those counterfactual circumstances. According to this counterfactual trend, the annual compensation of prime-age men still would have risen by 11 percent (instead of 13 percent).

Worth noting this comment from Tyler Cowen’s recent interview with Claudia Goldin in which she speculates differences in educational attainment by gender may be routed in biology (See In Our Airpods for full interview), “…GOLDIN It was about 10 years ago that some dean in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest admitted to the fact that they were accepting men with lower SAT, ACT, and grade point averages to increase diversity. COWEN: Men, probably, are not less intelligent than women, on average. What’s the pipeline problem? Is it too much homework and too many extracurriculars in high school or something else? Where are we failing our young boys? GOLDIN: We can go back to as early as we have data on high schools and know that girls attended high schools, graduated from high schools at far, far greater numbers than boys. If there is an issue here, it’s certainly not extracurriculars. It may have to do with what’s going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double X. COWEN: The value of an Ivy League degree — what percentage of that value do you think comes from signaling as opposed to learning? GOLDIN: Very little. I think that it’s not signaling. It’s probably networks….”

Tyler Cowen, “Claudia Goldin on the Economics of Inequality,” Conversation With Tyler, October 6, 2021, https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/claudia-goldin/

Claudia Goldin on the Economics of Inequality

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m chatting with Claudia Goldin, who is, quite simply, one of the leading economists. She is professor of economics at Harvard University, has made major contributions to economic history, the theory of income inequality, economics of education, gender economics, and much more. Most exciting of all, she has a new and excellent book out, called Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Claudia, welcome.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, I’m very, very pleased to be here, Tyler.

COWEN: Let me ask a question I’ve been wondering about. Why does China, right now, have so many of the world’s self-made female billionaires?

GOLDIN: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind being one.

COWEN: But it’s a big change in the payment of women, and it’s happened in one place. It hasn’t happened in America.

GOLDIN: As you well know, it’s a very large country. Let’s face it, Chinese women became more liberated during the Communist Revolution. Anyone who went to China during the period after the revolution saw that women really did work alongside men.

There’s no question then that equality has escaped China, as it has escaped much of the world, but I do get the sense… I was there in 1975, which is a very long story. I met many different people who were in some middle ranks, upper-middle ranks of the party, and there were a lot of women. Let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of women in 1975 in Congress, and certainly not in the White House.

COWEN: But if we look at a CCP meeting today — a photo — it just seems to be all men, right? There’s no Nancy Pelosi in there. At the middle level, women don’t seem to earn that well in China, but somehow, at the very top, there’s been this big breakthrough.

GOLDIN: Well, kudos to them.

On the pay gap

COWEN: A question about America. As you’ve shown, from 1995 to 2008 in the US, the gender earnings gap actually expanded. Why was that?

GOLDIN: Oh, it didn’t expand that much. We’re talking about blips on blips. It expanded more for the higher educated than for the lower educated — or should I say, it actually closed for the lower educated, whereas it stagnated for the higher educated, and the latter — a lot of that is due to the enormous expansion of inequality at the top. Women paid a relative price for the fact that inequality just zoomed upward.

COWEN: How much of that do you think is due to the growth of super firms? Especially in tech and finance, those seem to be fairly male-intensive areas. If they’re earning much more at the upper end, that would push up the income gap.

GOLDIN: I think it’s less that than the distribution itself, that men, for lots of different reasons, tend to be in the way-right tail. That’s going to be in finance. It’s not just in tech; it’s going to be in all areas. It’s going to be in surgery. It’s going to be in dentistry. It’s going to be in lots of different self-employment.

COWEN: It seems scalability should really matter. I could be the world’s best dentist. I can’t serve that many customers or patients well —

GOLDIN: Thank goodness.

COWEN: — but I won’t be the next Mark Zuckerberg, right?

GOLDIN: Right, but finance is certainly scalable. Let’s face it, surgeons are — when we look at the data that’s been put together for the upper, upper end — surgeons tend to be up there too.

COWEN: Now, you’ve argued in your book and in numerous articles that flexibility of hours is a critical variable for thinking about the earnings gap between men and women. If we look at the literature on firms, we seem to see that fixed costs are rising, intangible capital is rising, lower marginal cost, higher markups.

Does that mean that flexible working hours are hard to achieve when fixed costs are high? You would think when fixed costs are high, you want to basically take the people you have and drive them as much as possible, which, in fact, you see in finance and in tech.

GOLDIN: Right.

COWEN: So, should we be pessimistic about gender pay equity moving forward?

GOLDIN: The fixed cost here can also be coming from certain labor, from training, but you’re saying that the fixed costs are all that capital per labor has increased?

COWEN: Or its branding. Facebook, Google are very famous companies. They’ve achieved a certain position. At the margin, they want to work the people they hire fairly hard.

GOLDIN: Yes, but it doesn’t seem that difficult to create a small amount of redundancy to have good substitutes. All of these firms have professionals — think about consulting firms, accounting firms, banks, financial corporations, lawyers — all of them have individuals who are quite special, quite unique. And yet, I don’t think it takes that much to create a small amount of redundancy so you can have people hand things off.

That doesn’t mean that you’re creating cadres of individuals who are look-alikes and who are driving down their own price. Flexibility isn’t that difficult to achieve for the individuals who are at that upper end, whose earnings you are going to have to increase even more if they put their foot down and say, “I am not working during my vacation.” You’re going to have to increase their earnings even more. I don’t think it’s that heavy a lift.

COWEN: As skill levels rise, doesn’t it get harder to hand things off rather than easier? In a pharmacy, there’s skill required, but it’s not extreme.

GOLDIN: Well, that’s what you think.

COWEN: Substitute in another economist for an hour of your time — that’s very hard to do.

GOLDIN: I don’t think so. I know one. I live with one who I use as my substitute.

COWEN: Well, one, right? A coworker.

GOLDIN: First of all, I don’t think it’s in the training as much as it is in — and I think most people in the business would agree with me that, yes, there’s a lot of training for many different fields — accountants, lawyers, consultants — but most of the problem that they would claim there is, is in the handing off of information, in the passing off of information with high levels of fidelity and with trust. I think that one of the things that the Zoom world has done is it’s led me to trust you even though I can’t touch you.

COWEN: Do you think there are scenarios where marriage makes a meaningful comeback for lower socioeconomic groups? And what might those scenarios look like?

GOLDIN: Well, as someone who got married five years ago after living with someone for 26 years, I would have to get out of my own life into someone else’s. But I think that for many people, marriage creates more stability, either because they’ve made a commitment to themselves or those around them see them as more committed. I think the main benefit is to children, so that children have more stability.

COWEN: Sure, but for people without a college degree, marriage rates have fallen dramatically in the United States —

GOLDIN: Dramatically.

COWEN: — and a rise in single-parent families. Can you see economic forces that might reverse that? Or is that just going to keep on going?

GOLDIN: I don’t know if it’s going to keep on going. There was a really great piece in The Times the other day about mainly women with less than a college degree who said, “I don’t want to get married or have kids right now. I want a career. I want to be financially independent.” I don’t know whether that means that they are eschewing marriage altogether and that, in fact, we have a new group of women who, even though they don’t have higher degrees, are wonderfully financially independent and can raise children in good environments.

Obviously, the big issue — and this is the one I think is in the back of this question — is what’s happening to the men. If we can lift the economic opportunities of men who don’t have college degrees, then some of the problem, I think, will be solved. But that’s a big problem.

COWEN: How do men and women respond differently to narrow financial incentives in the workplace? Or is it just the same?

GOLDIN: To narrow, meaning they —

COWEN: If you give people bonuses, do they work harder, would be one of many questions. Do men and women respond the same to that or differently?

GOLDIN: I really don’t know. It’s a very, very good question. Did they respond in terms of working harder? That’s a good question to ask some consultant. I’m trying to think about whether… I think my answer would be that they both would respond the same, but that women have greater constraints who are parents.

I can be in a law firm and have phenomenal incentives. I can be in an accounting firm with phenomenal incentives. We know what those types of bonuses look like. But if a parent says, “I cannot work Thursday mornings,” and therefore gives up that benefit, that isn’t because she’s a bad worker and she’s not responding to the benefit. It’s that her needs are inconsistent with the firm’s demands.

COWEN: My intuition would be that whether women work at all depends more on incentives, but how much they work at the margin — if they work — depends less on incentives.

GOLDIN: That’s a good point, but of course, that initial margin is the bigger margin than the one that gets you into the workplace —

COWEN: Oh, sure.

GOLDIN: — and so then you have the issue of selectivity. The women who are in the workplace and in certain types of workplaces are going to be selected either on the basis of personal characteristics or the characteristics of their spouses.

COWEN: Why does the wage gap flip for Black women versus Black men?

GOLDIN: These are great questions. These remind me of questions that you might get in some generals exam, and then you think, “What does the wage gap flip?”

The Black male wage gap is a very difficult statistic because it’s a highly selected statistic. As we know from lots of very good work, if we take the population, the entire population will get one number. If we take the population that’s not incarcerated, we’ll get another number. If we take the population that’s never been incarcerated, we’ll get another number. I think that deep in that calculation are some of the nation’s largest ills.

COWEN: When I read noneconomists on wage gaps, I see the word intersectionality very often — the notion that there’s some nonlinear effect created by combining different types of discrimination. What is your take on intersectionality? Does it play a role in your argument?

GOLDIN: I would like to take a small course on intersectionality because I’m not certain — if I model this as a theorist — where the sections are going to be and how I figure out how many sections I want.

Someone has a gender at birth, they have a decided gender perhaps, they have a race, they have where they grew up. Many of these have a religion. They have the education of their parents, and many of these covary — they’re correlated.

In fact, this would be a great PhD thesis, and for all I know, someone would tell me, sure, when Rosen wrote it 40 years ago, or maybe Eddie Lazear. I don’t know, quite frankly, what to do with intersectionality.

COWEN: What do you think of this as a simple model? We all know the standard economic model — there can be too many tolls on the medieval river, right? It’s double marginalization. That can be a nonlinear impact — too many tolls, the river is just unusable. There are negative externalities, one predator on another. Think of discrimination as a kind of tax, which it is, and then you have multiple taxes from different directions, and they interact like the tolls on the river, and maybe intersectionality makes a lot of sense, no?

GOLDIN: Yes, I think that that’s a very, very good way of thinking about it. Thank you for giving me a little bit of theory to hang my hat on. But the problem is whether these are multiplicative, whether they’re less than that, if there really is some issue having to do with functional form, and I don’t know whether they are separable. The way in which you said it, they would be separable. Thank you for the idea. I will pass it on to one of my really good graduate students to model and then test. That’s a very, very good point.

COWEN: Another question.

GOLDIN: Another PhD dissertation coming from Tyler.

COWEN: Well, that’s what we’re here for.

GOLDIN: That’s what we should call this: PhD dissertations coming from Tyler.

COWEN: When I speak with high-achieving women I know, they tell me something frequently, more or less the same — that there’s a fear of sexual harassment, and this leads women to choose more careers where they don’t put themselves out there so much, and as a result will earn less, or quite likely they’ll be less famous, suffer other penalties, and that this is a major factor in career choice and earnings. What’s your take on that?

GOLDIN: Well, I think it can be. I in no way, shape, or form want to minimize that. My sense is that gender differences in earnings are not, in the majority, due to factors like that.

However, those factors we really want to root out. There’s obviously a difference between dating and romance, and sexual predators and sexual harassment. The fact that we have many so front-page cases about sexual harassment — both heterosexual and homosexual harassment — shows that it exists, and it should be rooted out. How much it is affecting the choices that women make and men make, I think, is not that gigantic.

COWEN: If we’re trying to explain gender pay gaps or inequities, and we think there are at least two factors — one is, for a given job, women might be paid less, right?

GOLDIN: Yes.

COWEN: Another factor is that women may end up in jobs or in majors or with interests that pay less in the longer run. How do you assess the relative proportion of those two factors?

GOLDIN: Well, we do all sorts of calculations to try to figure out what’s happening within versus between. Of course, one of the problems that we always face is the issue of aggregation. The more you disaggregate occupations or firm occupation, the more you’re going to minimize the problems that are happening within. It’s my sense, from the work that I’ve done, that the issue of occupational segregation, for example, has been vastly reduced over time.

What’s happening within occupations? The real challenge there is to understand whether individuals are being paid less for absolutely equivalent work within the same firm — and that is the standard federal guideline that one is looking for, that’s the smoking gun — or whether individuals are getting paid less, for example, because they’re working at the boutique law firm where they have amenities that they want, or whether they’re working at the Madison Avenue, Park Avenue law firm where they have fewer flexible amenities. I think that those are the challenges and the data challenges that we all have.

COWEN: As you may know, there’s a debate in experimental economics and also field experimental economics as to whether women are more averse to competition than men. One doesn’t have to think this is intrinsic; it could itself be the result of discrimination. But what’s your view there?

GOLDIN: I know all the experiments, and they’re done by extraordinary scholars. I myself have no idea how to do experimental economics because you could do just about anything, and you just have to be incredibly clever at designing these experiments.

I know that there’s lots of evidence that women take fewer risks. They are less pushy. They are more insecure, or at least we think that they are more insecure. There are very, very interesting experiments on stockbrokers, but of course, there’s the flip side that individuals who are highly risk-taking often lose a lot.

I think that, more and more, as women are educated at lower levels to realize that they can be anything that they want to be… If we look at younger women versus older women, I think that we do see that women are more competitive now than they certainly were when I was a kid.

It’s interesting that there is the great book Women Don’t Ask, by Linda Babcock and Laschever. I remember when that first came out, and I said, “How can you say women don’t ask? Go to any department store and see who’s standing there screaming about the fact that the toaster doesn’t work.”

COWEN: As you know, if we look at undergraduate majors, the ratio — it’s like 3:1, men to women, right? It’s not obvious that it’s budging. If we look at faculty, I read one estimate that the ratio for women hasn’t really improved since the 1990s.

GOLDIN: The ratio — you’re saying in economics or in what?

COWEN: The gender ratio. I’m not sure what level they were counting or adjuncts included, but it wasn’t obvious —

GOLDIN: You’re saying 3:1 for a particular major?

COWEN: For economics majors.

GOLDIN: Oh, okay.

COWEN: I believe the ratio’s 3:1 and not really budging.

GOLDIN: Well, I put those numbers together.

COWEN: Okay, and how is it evolving?

GOLDIN: It was more like 4:1 than 3:1, now about 2:1, so it has increased by quite a lot. One of the problems that we have, as a field, is that when students — before they even come into their freshman year, and they’re asked what do they want to major in, women will — if they want to major in the social sciences — will put down psychology, and men will put down economics, so we lose them before they even unpack their suitcases.

I ran an RCT I called Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge. We had 20 universities and liberal arts colleges begin a program for freshmen to explain to them that economics is not just about the things that their parents have told them about, which they find boring, which don’t involve people, but economics is a very people-oriented subject. It involves inequality, it involves children, it involves obesity, it involves health, it involves everything.

We moved the needle a bit. We’re still trying to figure out exactly how much we moved the needle. But the problem is, we do very, very poorly in our PR ourselves. So if you read the textbooks — and they are changing, and there are a number of recent textbooks that understood these problems — that economics is X and Y; it’s agents.

Most young people don’t want to deal with agents. They want to deal with humans, and particularly, it seems as if women, more than men, would like to deal with humans. And so women will tend to go into this field called psychology or sociology, which indicates in their writings that it’s about people. We indicate in our writings that it is about agents or Greek letters, and so we just have to do a lot better.

COWEN: How is the gender ratio for tenured economics professors evolving?

GOLDIN: CSWEP, that is, the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, puts together those data, and they are creeping upward, as one would think they would. Now, in some very interesting work, we can see that they are — I said the words “creeping up.” They’re not bounding up.

The reason that they’re not bounding up at first we thought was a pipeline issue, but now it’s pretty clear that it’s less the pipeline issue. While it was there and still is there, there’s also an issue with the fact that women — more than men — will leave academia and use their economic skills extremely well but outside the tenure track.

COWEN: Should we either abolish tenure or fundamentally change it so as not to penalize women, but also for other reasons? It seems grossly unfair.

GOLDIN: Yes, I certainly wouldn’t do it because it’s a penalty for one group or another. It is an issue that arose. It solved potentially an issue from some time ago. I don’t know if the fundamentals are the same that would support it. It is clearly a difficult problem in the sense that individuals have higher productivity when they’re young and then lower productivity. I think that having long-term contracts is useful for individuals in fields where they’re so good.

If we think about sports, clearly those people just clean up at the beginning, and then they become used-car salesmen or whatever they become. So the question is, do we have a completely changed academic environment in which the superstars clean up at some point and then they go into something else? I don’t think that that would work either.

I think that a very important thing to think about is that we produce a large number of products. We produce knowledge, and that’s really the hardest thing to figure out how to do, but we produce the dissemination of knowledge and teaching. And people who are older probably do that better, and that is not generally what tenure is given for.

COWEN: I’m sure you know the Stevenson and Wolfers paper, 2009. Why haven’t American women gained more in happiness?

GOLDIN: See, I’m not a great fan of that. I remember Betsey was interviewed on Mother’s Day one year. She was a new mother. The person interviewing her said, “Your work shows that mothers are less happy than they had been before they became mothers.” The person said, “That was a great question for Mother’s Day.” Betsey was stuck, and she said, “Well, yes, but they would never give up their baby.” I think that for me, as an economist, that says it all. There’s some problem.

COWEN: So, you think it’s not true that American women are less happy than they had been? I’m not sure what your stance is.

GOLDIN: My stance is that I’m not happy with the happiness measures.

COWEN: Do you think there’s something else they’re not picking up?

GOLDIN: Yes.

COWEN: That’s an ordinal-choice thing rather than stress in the moment?

GOLDIN: Yes.

COWEN: And that if people are choosing something out of a greater set of opportunities, they probably are happier?

GOLDIN: That’s right. It’s very hard to do that in general. Sometimes we rile up a group and get them to remember the things that they’re less happy about, and sometimes we show them where their lives are safe and secure and wonderful and plentiful, and then they get happier.

I remember when Dick Easterlin first began the happiness literature. I remember very, very well — it was a very long time ago — having dinner with him in Madison, Wisconsin, and talking about it. I was enthralled with trying to understand this happiness literature.

That was across countries, and it seemed interesting, from my Chicago theory point of view, that people recenter their happiness. You can be in a place in which, if you were plunked down there from somewhere else, you’d be miserable, and yet, you’re there, and you recalibrate yourself, just like people recalibrate themselves when they have a bad health event. It takes a while. I’m not certain what to do with the happiness literature.

COWEN: What best correlates with women keeping their maiden name after marriage? You’ve written on this.

GOLDIN: Right. For the period in which it increased enormously, which was in the early ’70s, there were several things that were important. The first one was that they were given an appellation. Rather than being called Miss or Mrs., they could be called Ms. It just opened the spigot. It just meant that more and more women could do it.

But more importantly — and this gets to the title of the article that I wrote with one of my undergraduates — it was that they already made a name. If you publish, or you’re a lawyer or a doctor or a yoga instructor or a hairdresser, and you are known as Tallulah Bankhead — to pick a great name — it’s going to be hard to change it. It became your identity. It became your calling card.

Then the question is, okay, fine, keep your name, but then there were some barriers to that. The barriers then began to be taken down. There were institutional barriers. There were legal barriers in terms of having to change your name with the Social Security system, on your passport, on your driver’s license. There were retrograde states that weren’t letting women who got married not change their names.

I remember I was at Princeton at the time, and I was married to a Princeton professor. I was no longer a professor for Princeton, and the library insisted that I use his name on my card despite the fact that I had been an assistant professor there with my name. That was one of the greatest affronts. All of that disappeared. That became, once again, a great enabler.

Then finally, it’s what to do when your kids are in school, and you have a different name. It’s very easy when the plumber comes to the door, to tell the plumber, “I am not Mrs. Katz,” but it would be much harder. It’s often hard still, unfortunately, to pick your kid up at school when you have a different last name than they.

COWEN: Why is the title Ms. more or less disappeared from the scene?

GOLDIN: I don’t think it has. Where has it?

COWEN: I heard it a great deal in the 1980s. It feels today that I hardly ever hear it. I also hear Mr. less often, to be clear, but Ms. seems to have vanished, viewed as almost condescending. I don’t know, I’m asking. I genuinely don’t know.

GOLDIN: Tyler, what do you hear?

COWEN: People avoiding the designation altogether.

GOLDIN: But on forms, the list of potential appellations will always include Ms. I think that one reason that it may disappear — and I think that it’s nice if we actually get to know our first names — is that, particularly in certain communities, there may be a sense that you don’t want to use any indication of gender. That gender has become a no-no.

I’m on a national committee in which we’re very used to talking about two genders. We have two genders, X races, Y ethnicities. You multiply them together, and you get the number of cells. And now we’re into more genders, so I think that may be one of the reasons.

COWEN: How much do you think the trans movement will, in fact, disrupt feminism by breaking down the two traditional categories, men and women? If someone wants to say, “The ratio of men to women in this area is that,” the trans movement could say, “We can’t quite presume that,” and blur the entire comparison. Is that going to matter moving forward? Or is that temporary?

GOLDIN: I don’t know. I don’t think any of this is temporary. If anything, I would applaud the fact that we are smoothing over gender and moving… I would think that in the greater scheme of things, that is a move towards greater equality in the sense that individuals — there is fluidity in who they are. I’m not quite certain what to do with it, but I applaud it.

COWEN: When you read The New York Times wedding announcement page, what honestly do you think? I tend to think two things: “My goodness, these elites are remarkably creative and self-replicating,” and then it strikes me how much people who are not religious at critical points in their lives actually want to invoke religion for the ceremony, but then it’s often just discarded again. That’s what I actually think when I read that page. What do you actually think?

GOLDIN: The first thing is that I’ve been reading that page for a very, very long time. For those viewers who don’t know, when I did the piece on name changes, one of the datasets that we used was The New York Times Style section, now called Vows. It would list whether the bride was or was not changing her name. We used that as a dataset.

To be perfectly frank, The New York Times, in their own mysterious ways, has changed that page to be some very — I shouldn’t say very, but relative to what it was — non-elite.

COWEN: Is single-sex education for women underrated or overrated? What do you think of it?

GOLDIN: I have a personal stance that it’s highly overrated, but I wouldn’t want to get into an argument with my friend, colleague, a person I have enormous admiration for, Amy Finkelstein, who believes thoroughly in it. When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I couldn’t imagine a world that I wanted to be in that didn’t have boys.

At the time, girls were, I think, far less assertive, far less serious. I had girlfriends, but I enjoyed being around the boys a lot more. I went to Bronx Science, which was about two-thirds boys. When I applied to college, I just could not imagine going to an all-girls school. Now I know the arguments in reverse, and I respect them, but it was certainly not for me.

On for-profit and non-for-profit education

COWEN: Why does for-profit education seem to fail so badly? Some parts of the learning sector are for-profit. Your books are put out by for-profit publishers, textbooks are. Berlitz seems to do okay relative to the language classes at your local state college, but for-profit education, as a whole, seems to implode. What’s the model there?

GOLDIN: I think it’s some for-profit education. It’s certainly not all for-profit education. I think that the problem is that the part of for-profit education that expanded the greatest was for BAs, particularly in fields like business administration management, and they became more BA mills.

When I was studying for-profit education, I really wanted to be able to look at the materials that were given to people. What were they studying? I was never able to break into that.

The problem is twofold. One is that there’s a huge profit incentive for the company. That’s, of course, not always a problem, as we know.

The other one is, the individuals are not as aware as they should be of what they’re getting themselves into. They are often very needy. They’re low-income. They’re first-generation college. Someone is dangling in front of them something that they really want. They desperately want something that’s going to get them out of the hole that life has put them in. That person who’s dangling it is not giving them sufficient information and sufficient amount of time to get out of this contract.

I think we saw that very, very clearly in the GAO audit studies of the for-profits. I think that that’s the problem. The for-profits that give short courses that give a one-year certification in, let’s say, medical technicians — what we’ve shown in our work, those are not the big problem. The big problem is what I just said.

Let me just say that I have taken short for-profit courses on dog training, and they work really well.

COWEN: For nonprofits, I’ve seen estimates that maybe no more than 40 percent of the people who try, finish. Does that just mean we have too many people trying to attend college? Isn’t the true rate of return on education actually pretty low, at the median at least?

GOLDIN: Let me back up and say that when we were just talking about for-profit education, that the non-for-profit, the non-selective portion could use a bit of change as well. It’s not as if they’re charging as high an amount or recruiting using techniques that are as extreme and exploitative as the for-profits, but they also may not really wake up individuals and tell them exactly what they have to do and how much time they need to spend.

We do know, Tyler, there’s incredibly good, really superb research on that marginal student. This is Seth Zimmerman’s phenomenal work. The marginal student does gain a tremendous amount by getting into a good college.

COWEN: But is that true for the marginal student on the side of the margin where they don’t finish? Your own work with Katz suggests there’s this discontinuity, some people who simply can’t leap the hurdle into having a college degree. It’s somehow too hard for them temperamentally.

GOLDIN: Possibly. I’m trying to go back. We have to go back to Seth’s work to know the point of identification. I thought the point of identification was the individual who was graduating from high school. He’s, in fact, including in that the probabilities that they don’t finish, and the rate of return for that person who was able to go to this Florida International was incredibly high.

COWEN: If you look at a school, say, like Duke or Emory, is it a long-run problem that if they admit people on their merits, there’ll be too many women in the school relative to men, and some kind of affirmative action will be needed for the males?

GOLDIN: These are private institutions, and they can generally accept whom they would like to accept for various reasons of diversity.

COWEN: Should they do that? Or should they just get in 76 percent women, say?

GOLDIN: I’m brought back to the original issues that were raised by a small number of liberal arts colleges and universities in the ’50s and the ’60s about why they should become coeducational institutions.

Those reasons were that their marginal student was not going to Princeton but going to Harvard, not going to Princeton but going to Penn, not going to Princeton but going to Cornell, because that student wanted an education that was more balanced in terms of what the world would look like when they got out. And that more balanced, then, was not necessarily Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but the one major thing that was missing from Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth and Amherst and Wesleyan and a whole bunch of places was women.

Those institutions, in a process that I’ve described in the origins of coeducation, led these institutions to move in the direction of accepting more women. Now what’s going through your mind, I think, is, “Yes, but they weren’t lowering quality. In fact, they were increasing quality.” Diversity, in any dimension, can be thought of as a plus for everyone.

It was about 10 years ago that some dean in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest admitted to the fact that they were accepting men with lower SAT, ACT, and grade point averages to increase diversity.

COWEN: Men, probably, are not less intelligent than women, on average. What’s the pipeline problem? Is it too much homework and too many extracurriculars in high school or something else? Where are we failing our young boys?

GOLDIN: We can go back to as early as we have data on high schools and know that girls attended high schools, graduated from high schools at far, far greater numbers than boys. If there is an issue here, it’s certainly not extracurriculars. It may have to do with what’s going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double X.

COWEN: The value of an Ivy League degree — what percentage of that value do you think comes from signaling as opposed to learning?

GOLDIN: Very little. I think that it’s not signaling. It’s probably networks.

COWEN: Networks. Why is there a sheepskin effect, then, which is quite strong? Because you could meet people there for three years and then just not finish.

GOLDIN: I don’t know what the numbers are for the sheepskin effects. I’m always very dubious of anything having to do with real signaling. In terms of sheepskin effects, I’m willing to read up on it, but I don’t know what it is. The networks are enormously important.

Sometimes I look at my undergraduates, and I think, “I would just be such a better person if I could live with these people. These are the most accomplished people.” You would be able to listen to someone playing the cello. You would be listening to someone teaching you about Verdi operas. They’re just an incredible group of individuals. In some sense, it’s not the same networking that Teddy Roosevelt would have been able to do, or John Kennedy. It’s, instead, an ability to grasp just an enormous amount in a mere four years.

I went to Cornell, which, of course, is an Ivy League school, too. I had a phenomenal experience, but nothing like I would have if I went to Harvard right now. That’s why I want to go back to college.

COWEN: You’re there now, right? You get their classes.

GOLDIN: I know, but I’m on the giving end and not the receiving end.

COWEN: The literature on returns to skill — there’s a piece by Beaudry, empirical work by Rob Valletta, which argues that post-2000 or so, the returns to skill are, in general, collapsing. Do you view that as stepping outside of your model with Katz in your book Race between Education and Technology? Or do you dispute the result? Or how do you see that?

GOLDIN: I would have to go back over the returns to which skills.

COWEN: Most skills. They suspect it may be due to automation or artificial intelligence.

GOLDIN: I read the work of David Deming, in which the set of skills that are in enormously great demand are a set of social skills. The question is how do you up social skills? It seems as if we know a lot about the demand for social skills; we know a lot less about the supply of social skills. It may be that when we think about the skills of the past, we’re thinking about, first, manual skills, then motor skills and mental skills. Now we’re moving into the range of social skills.

On past and future projects

COWEN: Our last segment on economic history. Why wasn’t there a Coasian solution to the Civil War, namely just buying out the slaveholders? This is going back to your work from, what, 1977?

GOLDIN: Well, Lincoln wrestled with that. When one thinks about what went on in the White House during the Civil War, one thinks about Lincoln just physically wrestling with all of these difficult issues. In fact, the slaves were purchased in the District of Columbia.

He was doing calculations about how we could pay slave owners for their property. For the longest time, one of the central issues in Lincoln’s mind was that property was extremely important to protect, and slaves were property, so we would have to buy out the slaves. He made lots of different calculations.

Of course, there were many different emancipation programs that preceded that. In fact, you may know that the North had slaves. New York did. New Jersey did, and by acts of the legislature, slaves were freed as of a certain age. That was what was called gradual emancipation. It wasn’t very good emancipation, and it could have had some horrific effects. In fact, one of the effects was that slaves were shipped from these northern areas to the South.

There were lots of different potential programs. One of the things that Frank Lewis and I did when we computed the cost of the Civil War was, we were essentially telling Lincoln, “Oops, you should have done it.”

COWEN: What best predicted anti-immigration sentiment in the 1920s?

GOLDIN: Well, what probably best predicted it was a combination — it appeared from some ancient work I’ve done — of areas that got immigrants, and had reduced the opportunities for others in the area, and for whom the immigrant groups that were there already were not the ones who were flooding in. One could think of the various parts of the country.

Ironically, the South was really pro-immigrant for the longest time because it viewed these immigrants as a wonderful substitute for a labor force that was migrating north and had, for decades, not been slave. So, the South was pro-immigrant. They became anti-immigrant only when they realized that immigrants weren’t going there, and when they were going there, they were Italians, and they were dark. These were pretty racist people.

In the North, the places that began to shift being anti-immigrant — and I was looking more at the shifts of voting for legislation that would put in place rules for literacy — those places were places that did not have large numbers of people from eastern, central, and southern Europe. The people there went on slamming the door in the face of their relatives.

COWEN: Very last question. Your book is coming out. Again, that book is Career and Family: Women’s Century‑Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin. Other than promoting your book, what will you be doing next?

GOLDIN: Oh, wonderful. I’m working on a couple of projects. This is a lot of fun. There was something called the Lanham Act that was passed in 1940 that was for infrastructure for America — lots of money. By 1942-43, it was pretty clear that America needed to — in fighting this war at home, in producing goods for the Allies, we needed to have women employed. So, the Lanham Act funds were repurposed for nursery schools and after-school programs.

What we’re doing with Joe Ferrie and Claudia Olivetti is finding out exactly where these Lanham schools were. Through the amazing ability that exists now, we can figure out whether individuals who were three to six years old during some period had some high probability of going to a Lanham school, what happened to them 50 years later. That’s one of the things I’m doing.

Another thing is trying to figure out why men who are fathers do so well relative to women who are mothers. That’s another piece to the puzzle.

COWEN: Claudia Goldin, thank you very much.

GOLDIN: It was a real pleasure to meet you almost in person, Tyler.

COWEN: Same here. Till next time.