Women’s rights “strange career”
This is the latest of Claudia Goldin’s papers where in Beckerian fashion she develops a model to understand why “the women’s movement was seen as more radical over time, why feminism has been eschewed by so many, and how the anti-women’s rights movement could gain traction and force so rapidly.” Goldin uses this framework to analyze women’s responses to two American National Election Surveys (ANES) questions from 1930 to 2020. These questions are (1) whether women should be granted a more equal role in running a business, industry, and government and (2) whether the respondent had warmth for the women’s (liberation) movement. A few interesting points from her analysis:
- Of note is that of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history in the U.S. from 1905 to 2023, 45% occurred between 1963 and 1973.
- Proponents and opponents of the expansion of women’s rights were divided far less by gender than they were split within gender by education, marital status, parenthood, employment, race, age, and region. For example, currently, married respondents were far less in favor of granting women an equal role than those who were not and were less warm to the women’s movement. College graduates and those currently employed were more in favor of giving women an equal role and warmer to the women’s movement. But in both cases, differences were far greater among women than among men.
Why Women Won
Author: Claudia Goldin
From: Harvard University
Women’s earnings in middle-age
There has been a lot of research on the gender widening of earnings that occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? This is the question that Goldin et al. analyze in this paper. To answer that question, they estimate earnings gaps in the U.S. for two education groups (college graduates and high school graduates who did not complete college) using longitudinal data from the NLSY79 (a nationally representative sample of 12,686 young men and women born during the years 1957 through 1964) that tracks respondents from their twenties to their fifties. The authors find that hours of paid work initially plummet with motherhood, an effect that is larger for the college graduate group. Hours stay lower for mothers than non-mothers in the college graduate group but increase as the youngest child begins school and eventually exits high school. Hours for mothers in the non-college graduate group become virtually identical to non-mothers. College graduate women see an increase in their earnings as they move from their late thirties to their late fifties.
But there is a moment when childcare demands greatly lessen and women can increase their hours of paid work and assume greater career challenges. We can think of that moment, metaphorically, as when mothers reach a summit and then run down the other side of the mountain. But even though they increase their hours of work, they never reach the rich valley of gender equality. In large measure, their inability to earn the same as fathers is due to the positive relationship that children have with the earnings of men and their negative relationship with women.
When the Kids Grow Up: Women’s Employment and Earnings Across the Family Cycle
Authors: Claudia Goldin, Sari Pekkala Kerr, Claudia Olivetti
From: Harvard University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College
