The occupations with the largest gender gaps were those with the least temporal flexibility

Claudia Goldin is a Harvard Professor of economics. I very much admire her doggedness in trying to wrest data from history in order to answer important questions. She is logical and empirical which trumps her tendency, from my perspective, of approaching the world from a very privileged position. It seems in some of her work as if she most cares about what can be done to improve the lives and welfare of privileged upper class, highly educated, women. Regardless of that perceived bias, I have the sense she follows the evidence where it leads, regardless of what she wants it to say. That is admirable.

For example, she had some research out in the past couple of years affirming what we already know which is that the popular shibboleth of a gender pay gap is pure malarky. But in that process Goldin explores an issue which I have long identified as important but which I have never seen elsewhere researched - the importance in some business sectors of work flexibility. Success in those sectors isn't only a matter of the volume of time (hours per week) and duration (years in sector) but very materially, also, flexibility. In management consulting, in law, in project based work, it isn't only a factor of putting in a lot of hours, it is a matter of putting in those hours when they are most needed. The client calls Saturday morning and unexpectedly needs you in Hong Kong on Monday morning. Some employees are so situated that they can manage that. They benefit. Others are not so situated. They aren't punished per se, but they miss out on an opportunity. Goldin properly, I think, provides some substance empirical evidence supporting the importance of that issue. Goldin then focuses on how can women who are working inflexible hours and/or limited hours overcome the advantage arising from flexibility. She comes up with the generic proposition that in order to better advantage educated women in professions, they should make work more plannable. Fine as far it goes. But it goes nowhere because that isn't the world we live in. Find out how to make inflexible and part time workers more productive than they are and you begin to get at the root issue. Enjoining businesses to change the world to benefit a small sliver of the workforce is, I think, unproductive.

This interview of her by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has a lot of good material about her research interests and findings.

Some passages I found very interesting.

So then the question is, why are there some occupations with large gender gaps and others with very narrow gaps? There are some occupations where people face a nonlinear function of wages with respect to hours worked; that is, people earn a disproportionate premium for working long and continuous hours. For example, someone with a law degree could work as a lawyer in a large firm, and that person would make a lot of money per unit of time. But if that person worked fewer than a certain number of hours per week, the pay rate would be cut quite a bit. Or someone could work fewer or more flexible hours as general counsel for a company and earn less per unit of time than the large-firm lawyer. Pharmacy is the opposite — earnings increase linearly with hours worked. There's no part-time penalty.

I started thinking about a very simple framework in which temporal flexibility is the important issue and I wondered if occupations with large gender gaps are those with relatively high penalties for not putting in the hours or not attending the meeting or not going to Japan to see the client. And those are things that might be particularly difficult for parents. If women have a greater burden with respect to child care, then these occupations will be the occupations where women pay the greatest penalties. So then I began to zero in on the occupations where the penalties were the lowest and ask what was so different about them.

To do so, I went to the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a directory supported by the Department of Labor. In O*NET, each of the 469 occupations in the census is covered and some are further subdivided, often by industry. And for each of those occupations there are hundreds of details about the job gathered, in part, by observing or surveying workers — details ranging from the strength requirements to the lighting and other ambient conditions of the workplace. But relevant to my research, O*NET provides information on: How important is face time? What types of interpersonal relationships are there? Do people work on projects independently or in teams?

This was a real beacon of light. Sure enough, the occupations in the corporate and financial sector were all skewed in the direction of having O*NET characteristics that meant employees were required to be there. And in the technology occupations, people were working more independently and there wasn't a lot of face time. I also used longitudinal data on lawyers from the University of Michigan and survey data I collected on University of Chicago MBAs with Marianne Bertrand and Larry Katz. I also had access to data on a large sample of pharmacists. And from all these sources it became clear that the occupations with the largest gender gaps were those with the least temporal flexibility, where people are complements for each other rather than good substitutes.

Saying workers are good substitutes for each other sounds like you're commoditizing them. But it can be true even for very high-income professions. I got a note from my ophthalmologist after I had a minor procedure that essentially said, "You will probably never see me again because there are 20 different professionals in my group who can take care of you." And pharmacy, which is my favorite example, is very highly paid. For

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In many different writings in the late 19th century and early 20th century in the United States, you start to sense that having more education, being more literate and more numerate, got you a lot further in the labor market. Contemporary economists noticed it too; Paul Douglas [who taught at the University of Chicago, among other schools, before becoming a U.S. senator] described it as an era of "noncompeting groups" — individuals who had a modicum of a high school education, let alone a college education, did phenomenally better than others, because high school education simply wasn't widespread.

Larry Katz and I used data from the 1915 Iowa state census to show that these pecuniary returns were not just a result of the shifting of individuals from blue-collar or agricultural occupations to white-collar occupations, but in fact, even within the agricultural sector more-educated farmers did better than less-educated farmers. The reasons are pretty obvious: The educated farmer did his accounting better, could figure out which crops to plant, and could read about different breeds of animals and how to protect them from disease. More-educated workers also did better than less-educated workers in the manufacturing sector and in the construction trades.

Individuals observed the high returns to education, and this unleashed a nationwide movement — in large measure a decentralized, grassroots movement — to build and staff high schools across the country. In 1910, only 9 percent of 19-year-olds in the United States had a high school diploma. That climbed up to 51 percent by 1940. There was a huge shift during the century, as the physical capital we were using became relatively less important than the mental capital we carried inside ourselves.

EF: What is the significance of the high school movement being a grassroots movement?

Goldin: The education system in the early 20th century was a decentralized system that was very open, albeit with some important exceptions, such as African Americans and certain immigrant groups. But by and large, relative to Europe, America was educating all its children. European visitors would come to the United States and be shocked by how America was wasting its resources. European countries were cherry picking which students would get a good education; they set very high standards and had national exams. We didn't. We had more of a free-for-all, grassroots, local system in which until recently there were few state exams for graduation. That served us very well by getting a large number of students to graduate from high school. By the 1950s, U.S. high school enrollment and graduation rates were relatively high, much higher than Europe.

But then various European countries started looking more like the United States; they began to pull more individuals into high schools, some via technical schools but also by expanding more general education. And many of them did so without abandoning the higher standards of the more elitist period. The United States, on the other hand, has had a very hard time adopting uniform standards. The idea has been that the different parts of the country have different demands, so we don't need to have national standards. And it's true that we do have a far more heterogeneous population. But the enormous virtue of decentralization has more recently caused some difficulty.

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Inequality measured by labor incomes is relatively high from the earliest that we can measure it, in the late 19th century; educated workers did very well relative to everyone else until about 1920. But then the high school movement burst forth and the supply of educated workers increased, and the quasi-rents to higher education began to decline quite a bit, which was reinforced by the Great Depression and the narrowing of the wage structure in the 1940s that Bob Margo and I termed "the Great Compression." But in the late 1970s and early 1980s both inequality and the education premium started rising again. (This is apart from what's happening at the very top; my book with Katz is about the bottom 99 percent.)

What's going on? You can see in the data that education, in terms of years of education or the fraction of the population that graduated high school or college, increases beginning around 1910, but then around 1980 the rate of increase slows down. The easiest way to think about it is as a race between education and technology, or between the supply of skilled workers and the demand for skilled workers. The demand for educated workers is moving out at a constant rate, and as long as the supply keeps moving out at a pretty sturdy rate it keeps the premium to education in check. But when the supply stops moving out there's a large increase once again in the premium to educated workers. That's the very simple one-graph story.