Career and Family: Womens Century-Long Journey toward Equity

(Hardback)

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Description

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

"An Economist Book of the Year"
"A Behavioral Scientist's Notable Book"
"A Wall Street Journal Favorite Political Book of the Year"
"A FiveBooks Best Nonfiction Books of the Year"
"Winner of the Richard A. Lester Book Award, Industrial Relations Section Industrial Relations Section"
"Career and Family is a radical book. It is also brilliantly researched and argued."---Lily Meyer, New Republic
"

Career and Family . . . looks at how women have struggled to balance work and home over the decades. Among its many takeaways is the notion that female participation in the workplace changes the very nature of work.

"---Rana Foroohar, Financial Times
"Goldin weaves together complicated data sets that no one else thought to look at. . . . [She] brings such data to life."---Joan C. Williams, Times Literary Supplement
"

There are many reasons to read [Career and Family]. The main one being that [it is] excellent. . . . Goldin is a natural teacher, which comes across on the page. The book is also, in some ways, deeply personal.

"---Emily Oster, ParentData
"Provocative and compelling." * The Economist *
"A new book by Claudia Goldin of Harvard University, an expert on women and work . . . traces the history of work and family for college-educated women, and diagnoses what still troubles their careers today." * The Economist *
"In this deeply researched, engagingly written, and surprisingly personal book, Goldin summarizes the history and current state of gender disparities in employment and pay, both in general and specifically for college-educated women."---Barry Eichengreen, Foreign Affairs
"

This is no ordinary book . . . . Goldin has written a chatty, readable sequel to [Betty] Friedans [The Feminine Mystique], destined itself to become a paperback best-seller all the more persuasive because it is rooted in the work of hundreds of other labor economists and economic historians over the years.

"---David Warsh, Economic Principals
"Combining diligent research with acute observations, accessible case studies, and practical solutions, this is a refreshing take on a pernicious social problem." * Publishers Weekly *
"A must-read for those who care about gender gaps. . . . Goldin does a compelling job of running through the historical data, providing the surrounding cultural context, and explaining how technological and legal changes affected women over the years. . . . In Career and Family, Goldin expertly lays out the history of college-grad womens advances in the work force, and she carefully dissects where the remaining gender gap originates."---Robert VerBruggen, Institute for Family Studies
"This book is a must-read."---Melissa Davies, Society of Professional Economists

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, The Defining Moment, and Understanding the Gender Gap. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Twitter @PikaGoldin