Career and Family: Womens Century-Long Journey toward Equity

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A renowned economic historian traces womens journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formedand the barriers they facedin terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are greedy, paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered womens advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemics silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Reviews

"This book is a must-read, especially for anyone balancing parenting with a career and frustrated with the disparate challenge on women in doing so. It is a powerful look at the history and data of the generations of women who have faced this challenge and the progress they made, and uses this history and data to show the way toward meaningful progress."--Emily Oster, author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet

Author Bio

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her books include Women Working Longer, The Race between Education and Technology, and Understanding the Gender Gap.