Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity

Product Description

A renowned economic historian traces women’s journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at homeA 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 formed―and the barriers they faced―in 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 women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s 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.

Review

”
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

”
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

“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 women’s advances in the work force, and she carefully dissects where the remaining gender gap originates.”
—Robert VerBruggen, Institute for Family Studies

”
This is no ordinary book . . . . Goldin has written a chatty, readable sequel to [Betty] Friedan’s [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

Review

“The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the frustration of mothers who are fed up and exhausted. In a sweeping overview of a century of change in how women work and have families, Claudia Goldin gives this problem a name: greedy work. Her tour de force shows us where we have been and where we must go if women are ever to achieve full equality in their marriages and their jobs.”
―Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan

“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 sh