For women who want a career and a family, we might expect things would be easier today. After all, women have greater access to education and job opportunities. We’ve seen advances in reproductive health. And we’ve made inroads in anti-discrimination laws and policies. Yet gaps in pay and promotions remain a problem.

Today’s guest, Claudia Goldin, is a Harvard University economist who’s spent her career studying women in the workplace. She believes there’s an important factor we’ve overlooked, namely, greedy work. These are jobs with lots of financial upside and promotion potential for employees who can log long hours and take on big assignments at a moment’s notice. And it’s the work that women with children often take less advantage of compared to their partners. As a result, ambitious career women can find themselves stalled out and earning less.

In her book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, Claudia traces how women got here. Drawing on extensive data sets, she reveals five patterns in women’s career and family behaviors: for women graduating from 1900-1910s, it was either career or family; for 1920-1930s graduates, jobs then families; with 1950s graduates, families then jobs; women graduating in the 1970s had careers then families; and, for women graduating in the 1980s-1990s it’s been careers and family.

Yet, for today’s ambitious career women juggling career and family, it can mean increasing dissatisfaction with both. And in analyzing the way many careers today are structured, Claudia helps us understand why. It’s an insightful way to understand a problem we’ve been living with for a long time.

Episode Links

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Other Side of the Mountain: Women's Employment and Earnings over the Family Cycle

Assessing Five Statements about the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women

Marriage Bar

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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CM 205: Claudia Goldin on Women, Careers, and Greedy Work

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