“I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.
Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their labour was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling (辛苦工作) in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. According to America’s historical statistics, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.
The standard pattern of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.
Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of toil. Goldin argued that stigma (污名) reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy and neglectful of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the office clerk job of the 20th century was easier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse. With the arrival of tight labour markets in the 1950s, discriminatory policies against hiring married women were virtually abandoned.
Today, women still work and earn less than men. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, Goldin says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are conflicting with being on call for children. Perhaps men should also share the family burden and allow their partners to be more professionally involved instead.
【小题1】How does Claudia Goldin find women’s domestic labour?| A．Complicated to understand. | B．Tricky to assess. |
| C．Less changeable than men’s work. | D．More valuable than men’s career. |
| A．They took an active part in workforce. |
| B．They were comfortable enough not to work. |
| C．They stood a good chance in office jobs. |
| D．They were still stuck in household chores. |
| A．To explain the current gender gaps. |
| B．To introduce the employee reward system. |
| C．To call on men to stay at home. |
| D．To expose the greedy nature of capitalists. |
| A．Gender Pay Gap Research Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics |
| B．How Goldin Transformed Our Understanding of Women’s Work |
| C．Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equality |
| D．Do Greedy Jobs Cause the Gender Pay Inequality |
