A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

"Yes, so this article relates neatly to what we were just talking about. Goldin is a very influential economist. She wrote this article for her presidential address to the American Economic Association. What she said was that women earn less than men because they desire ‘certain amenities’ at work, by which she means flexibility. Her argument is that women are earning less than men because they are paying a price for that flexibility. And she shows that men and women start out equally in the workforce, but that they get more unequal over time though, as I mentioned earlier, the earnings of women who have no children look more like men’s. The flexibility she talks about is the number of hours of work, the precise time of work, the predictability of work and of travel, and the ability to schedule one’s own hours. So any time off for MBAs is heavily penalized. Flexible work allows part-time work, as in your case. She is arguing that, in order for women to earn salaries more like men’s, the entire workplace is going to have to be changed. I disagree with her about government regulation. I think that if we had a national policy of paid leave for new parents—men and women—that would go a long way toward providing some of the flexibility that is needed. And if we had a national childcare system, where childcare would be subsidised for people who can’t afford it, and we knew that it was high quality, with trained childcare workers who are reasonably paid, that would go a long way toward making it possible for women to stay in the workplace and to take jobs that are perhaps less flexible on a daily basis. But in terms of changing the workplace, I love the quote in Getting to 50/50 by the former CEO of Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, who said, ‘Businesses need to be 24/7, individuals don’t.’ So companies that need to run on a 24/7 basis need to figure out how to organize work so that people who work for them don’t have to be available 24/7. And I believe what Claudia Goldin is saying is that that is the kind of change that has to take place. And that really is not amenable to government regulation. That, I think, will come when more men say, ‘We want flexibility at the workplace as well.’ I’m very proud. The class I used to teach at the business school was called ‘Women and Work.’ Now I call it ‘Work and Family,’ and almost 40% of the students are men. They are puzzling over how to make their workplaces more flexible when they have the power to do that. Yes, I believe there is scope for that. Right now, when someone in finance is working for a client, that client wants that particular individual 24/7. But if there were two partners working on the deal, and the client knew that either one of the partners would be a good person to talk to, and the client knew that the partners were communicating with one another on a regular basis, that would go a long way to changing the demands on any one individual. Yes, it might, because there would be two brains working on the problem rather than one. Certainly researchers have found that rest is important in medicine. It used to be that doctors in training worked 80 hours a week or more. It became very clear that they were doing a better job when they were getting adequate sleep at night."