Claudia Goldin, 2023 Nobel Prize winner in Economics: ‘Feminism became a very bad word in the United States’

In 2023, Claudia Goldin (New York, 78 years old) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in recognition of her studies on the underrepresentation of women in the labor market and on the gender wage gap, which she was among the first researchers to identify. She is the only solo woman winner in the history of the prestigious award. An economic historian, she is quick to remind that it is not her job to predict the future, but rather, to analyze events that have already taken place and clarify the reasons as to why they happened. In 1990, she published the iconic Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, a work that felled several myths about gender inequality in the professional field. She’d never claim to be a fortune teller, but the Harvard professor does identify with being a detective. She has concluded that economic growth and education alone are not enough to reduce the salary gap. For decades, the presence of women in the job market grew as the result of better educational resources and contraceptive methods, which allowed them to delay motherhood and develop their career. But differences in financial compensation persist, largely due to laboral structures and the mechanisms of promotion, which favor men.

Her 2021 book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Towards Equality (Princeton University Press) addresses a good part of this historic evolution, taking place over the course of several generations. Our interview, which took place via videocall, happened days before the U.S. presidential elections. During it, Goldin speaks about Trump’s female supporters and confesses her fears regarding the policies that he wants to enact. After ballots were tallied, she declined to comment, but it seems of little importance: the indicators she mentions in our original talk seem to have already unfurled into new realities.

Question. One of the issues you have covered is presentism by men, meaning that men are always available for work, always available for the manager. Is sexism more present at home than at the office?

Answer. Well, it’s a mirror image of what goes on in the home. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. If you take out the time that you will spend with your clients or in an office or on the job, you have less time to do your care work, you have less time to be at home. People are not creating time.

Q. In recent years, we’ve seen women be more ready to fight at the office for their needs, but many times, men continue to be more available to cover unexpected issues at the office, to extend their workdays… That is to say, women are very clear about their demands at work, but things change when it comes to the home. Is it easier to fight the battle for equality in the professional sphere than the domestic one?

A. It is an important point, which is, are women not using their bargaining power at home the same way they use it in the office? I think that sometimes, you have a set of constraints. A simple example is that both members of a [heterosexual] couple can take the high-paying job and put in the long hours, or they can both take the more flexible job. But if you have children, at least one of you has to be on-call at home. Which one will be on-call is the issue. There’s only so much bargaining power you can have in the household if the difference in incomes is very, very large. I think your point is, that if women step up to the plate and say, “I’m going to be Kamala Harris, I’m going to spend more time in the office,” how many men can be convinced to do the opposite? The other way of going about it is to have the workplace change, which is a better solution than having the home change. Let’s say that the person who takes the more greedy job is based on a simple coin flip. So, in every household with children or care responsibilities, 50% of the time, the woman takes the greedy job and 50% of the time, the man does. I don’t consider that to be the greatest solution either, because then you have gender equality, but couple inequity. I’d much rather have couple equity and gender equality.

If men take more leave when the child is two months old, will that alter what they do when the child is four and six and 10? We don’t have a lot of evidence about that”

Q. In Spain, men and women have the same permissions for paternity and maternity leave and both are required to take the first six weeks off after their child’s birth. Do you think this is a good tool towards being able to achieve that equality?

A. I understand that this is how you get both parents to be equal at home during the first few months after their child’s birth, but we still have a lot more time to cover. Children last a much longer time, so it’s not clear to me that that does the trick. It’s an interesting question whether something like that changes social norms and gets men to spend more time with their kids. Many women tell me that it isn’t so much how much time you put into things, but the fact that you’re the planner. You plan for the lunches, you plan for the pediatrician’s visits, you are the one with the calendar and the schedule. That is a mental load. So, the question that you pose, which is a very good one, is if men take more leave when the child is two months old, will that alter what they do when the child is four and six and 10? And we don’t have a lot of evidence about that.

Q. What does your instinct tell you?

A. My instinct tells me that we have to have firms on board. If you don’t, and any individual who takes time off is penalized in some manner, you’re not going to get a lot of buy-in.

Q. We’re living in a time of political shift. In the United States, there was a new wave of feminism after 2017. But at the same time, we are facing a sexist reaction. Do you see this political shift, this new wave of reaction against feminism, as a danger to shutting the gender gap?

A. Let me go back a little bit. I would not use the word “feminism,” because feminism became a very bad word in America. I would use the term “women’s rights,” because people misunderstand — I don’t know about Spain, but people in the United States really misunderstand what the word feminism means. Feminism is simply the notion that men and women are equal in all manners, but it became linked to a more strident group of individuals in the 1970s. That was a very long time ago, and most of the people who react to the word have no idea what went on back then. But my sense is that, like many things in the world, when times are good, when people feel like they have income, wealth — when they feel that they can go to the grocery store and things don’t look that much more expensive than they did a week before — they are more generous in terms of what they give to charity and in how they view alternative movements. And when they feel stressed, they react and move much further in some other direction. We can call it to the right, we can call it conservative, we can call it masochistic, we can call it patriarchal. We see in many different polls that men who are lower-educated, lower-income, etc., are the ones who are lashing out the most.

I don’t really understand why so many women vote for Trump. There are people who are just suspicious of lots of different things, and he has given them license to be suspicious”

Q. You have proved throughout your career that economic growth and the gender gap are not especially related. But many people still say the best way to reduce inequality is growth, growth, growth. Why do you think this still happens?

A. Economic growth could lead to, let’s say, better funding for education, which in certain places might disproportionately favor lower-income people, minorities, women. But before I jump into saying anything about the gender gap in earnings and economic growth, I have to understand why the gender gap in earnings exists. If we analyze it and come up with the notion that it exists because women are shunted into jobs at the bottom of the ladder, then economic growth might do something to affect that. If we look at it and we say it’s because women step back and don’t take these greedy jobs, then economic growth isn’t going to do very much at all.

Q. Artificial intelligence is going to make a big change in the job market. How can this affect the gender gap in salaries?

A. I do not predict the future. No one will be able to answer your question adequately. AI is going to affect different jobs in different ways, and in ways that we don’t even know right now. We can think about how it might affect jobs in law or in medicine, but how it’s going to affect a worker who is in retail or a hairdresser, I don’t have a clue.

Q. How do you think the U.S. elections are going to affect the labor market, the gender gap?

A. This is a scary time in certain ways. In other ways, we can look back and we could say, we’ve survived, that whoever runs the country, it doesn’t matter that much. But what is scary about this election, forgetting about abortion and sexual harassment, is the notion that this president and the people who support him want to scale down government. I’m someone who doesn’t depend upon government very much — other than the fact that I drive on roads and use bridges and depend upon the military and the police and firefighters. There are a lot of people who don’t quite understand that government is there for a really important purpose. To be perfectly frank, I don’t even think Trump understands some of what the conservatives would like to do, he just goes where he thinks the wind is blowing. But some of it would certainly harm the education of lower-income children, for sure. When a conservative group says things like, “Let’s just close down the Department of Education, let’s close down the libraries, let’s just change the way we run our healthcare system,” that’s just dangerous. I live in a personal bubble, I live in a geographic bubble. But many people in America don’t live in such luxurious and well-stocked bubbles. And I worry for them.

We see in many different polls that men who are lower-educated, lower-income, etc., are the ones who are lashing out the most”

Q. Why would you say there are still many women who are voting for Trump?

A. That’s an extremely good question. I don’t really understand. There are people who are just suspicious of lots of different things, and Trump has given them license to be suspicious. They’re suspicious of liberals, yet they’re precisely the people who might benefit from their policies. I might be able to understand people who are conservative and who are more religious, more family values. They see the Democrats and the more liberal part of the United States as essentially going to hell in a handcart. OK, I can sympathize somewhat with them.

Q. You once said that the 20th century was the century of human capital in the United States. Is the 21st century also the century of human capital?

A. It certainly continues. What I said was, the 21st century was the American century, the earliest nation to say, educate the masses. And one would have to qualify that a bit, because “the masses” often excluded Blacks, which is the most important minority group in the United States. But America educated the masses of its population more than any other country did. Then other countries caught up very, very rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, rapidly in terms of higher education as well, South Korea is the most extraordinary example. Many countries have realized that the wealth of a nation is not just its resources and capital, but its human capital. If not for that, Hong Kong and Singapore would be terribly poor places. But once again, I do not predict the future. I’m an economic historian, I do very, very well with the past.

Q. How optimistic are you, at this point in history, keeping in mind everything we’ve talked about?

A. I think there are more things going on than the battle of the sexes. When I think about optimism and pessimism, I get more worried about what’s going to happen to a warming planet. In terms of the battle of the sexes, I’m always optimistic, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed doing what I’m doing. One of the things that I’ve been involved in right now is sports. I’ve been an advisor to the WNBA’s Players Association, because they are negotiating a new contract. When [professional] women’s basketball began in the United States in the 1990s, they were simply given a small piece of the basketball universe. But they’ve become very popular and now they need much, much larger arenas. If you think the 83 cents that women make for every dollar men make is small, imagine that a women’s basketball player is making less than one cent on the male dollar.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition