Claudia Goldin: A brand of feminism that is not threatening but makes a difference

At the end of 1991, while preparing my thesis project to apply for a position at the European University Institute in Florence, I came across an inspiring book that had just been published in English: Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. Its author was Claudia Goldin, and she was addressing exactly what I wanted to investigate: the historical roots of gender inequality in labor markets as the only way to understand why women participate less than men, with lower salaries, in a more precarious and temporary way, in a smaller number of sectors and with less probability of promotion.

That same year, Claudia Goldin became the first woman to be offered tenure at the Harvard Economics Department. That achievement was also an achievement for many other women who were investigating the same issues and who found in her appointment a protection against the surrounding contempt.

Back then, and until very recently, economic history studies did not include women in their analyses and calculations. Whenever Goldin has been asked why she investigated gender inequalities in labor markets, she has responded that she did so for academic reasons. Indeed, it seems incredible that GDP, activity rates, living standards and productivity all ignored the economic participation of half of the population. Not only was women’s enormous contribution in the form of unpaid work being disdained, but also their paid activity. It seemed natural to do without half the population, despite the numerous, compelling and painstakingly obtained evidence to the contrary.

Claudia Goldin demonstrated from Harvard what many of us were also researching: how women have always worked, although our participation has varied over time, being higher in agrarian societies and, later, in service societies, and lower in industrial societies. Goldin showed that this participation in recent centuries is U-shaped, although much of the lower area of the U is due to a statistical effect associated with poor data collection. What Goldin did not explain was why in the literature women appeared by default as inactive, and how this is connected with what society assumes — then and now — that men are and do, and what women are and do.

She has never been an uncomfortable figure. She was always well integrated into the mainstream of economics, yet never stopped advancing gender analysis within this field. And thanks to her academic rigor, the quality of her research and her ability to occupy spaces of power in her field, she effected changes to it, made it progress and, as a consequence, also helped women in the same line of work.

This contribution was followed by others such as the Pollution Theory of Discrimination, which explains the opposition of workers and unions to female hires in male-dominated economic sectors; the effect of “blind auditions” in symphony orchestras, which improved the hiring of women; or the importance of the oral contraceptive pill for women’s life and career choices, as it allowed them to delay marriage and children, invest more in their own education and consider the option of embarking on a professional career.

In her latest research, captured in her recent book Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, Goldin turns her gaze to caregiving and time in the family, and to the division of roles within heterosexual North American couples with college degrees and their interaction with the “economy of greed,” which disproportionately rewards long hours, overtime and weekends, leading many women to avoid them and instead specialize in caregiving and sectors with regular working hours.

Although Goldin goes further today than 30 or 40 years ago in her feminist analysis of economics when she points out that the organization of work in companies must change and men must claim their caregiving time, her starting point remains the classic premises of mainstream economics, based on choice, and nowhere does she speak of the need for a deeper and more systemic transformation, or demand regulatory changes that are fundamental to understanding advances in equality.

Perhaps that is why she has never been active in feminist economics forums, where her contemporaries such as Julie Nelson, Lourdes Benería or Nancy Folbre have made essential contributions that we will hardly see rewarded with this misnamed Nobel Prize in Economics. Even so, I believe that Goldin is very worthy of the award for having managed to introduce gender inequalities and the issue of caregiving into the economic orthodoxy. Displaying a kind of feminism that is not threatening, she has still managed to advance knowledge in economics, influence economic policy and help with the promotion of economic researchers, and that is priceless.

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