Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, has made a major contribution.

Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, has made a major contribution.
The chronic social issue of gender wage gap
A monumental work that analyzes the cause and suggests solutions!

Claudia Goldin, the first woman to be tenured professor of economics at Harvard, has published her latest book, Career and Family.
Although he is an economist who is always mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics, this is the first time that his books have been translated and introduced in Korea.


Professor Goldin primarily explores the origins of current issues through historical review, and has researched a wide range of topics, including the gender income gap, women in the workforce, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration.
In the recently published book, Career and Family, I uncover the causes of the gender income gap, a problem I have been researching my entire life, and suggest solutions.
The author analyzes American college-educated women over the past 100 years, dividing them into five generations, and pursues the gender wage gap. Richard Thaler, the 2017 Nobel Prize winner in economics and co-author of Nudge, praised this work, saying, “It presents a perfect answer through a masterpiece like a historical novel.”

I once asked students in an undergraduate seminar class what they wanted from marriage.
One student answered immediately.
“I want a man who wants what I want.” The student’s honest expression of her desire for fairness between spouses was truly impressive.
Many students and my friends have told me similar stories since then, but no one has expressed it so concisely.
The problem is that even if you marry a man who “want[s] what you want,” it is impossible for both of you to have demanding careers, and you will continue to be in a dilemma where you have to give up equity between spouses for household income, and vice versa.
---From "Chapter 1: Another 'Nameless Problem'"

Time is the great equalizer.
Everyone has the same amount of time and has to make difficult decisions about how to allocate it.
Fundamentally, the challenge faced by struggling women trying to balance a successful career and a happy family life is one of time conflict.
Investing in your career usually means devoting a significant amount of time to work when you are young.
However, this is also the age when women 'must not miss out' on having children.
Moreover, it takes a lot of time to have children and start a family.
These choices will greatly influence your future life, and once you make them, they cannot be undone or changed.
Fifty years ago, a female executive and mother of three offered career advice to young women, saying:
“It’s very difficult.
“Do it anyway.”
---From "Chapter 1: Another 'Nameless Problem'"

Over the past century, American college-educated women have fallen into five strikingly distinct groups.
Women within each group are largely homogeneous in terms of the constraints imposed on them and the aspirations they form under (and sometimes despite) those constraints.
Age at marriage, age at first birth, likelihood of being married, and likelihood of having children are also similar within each group and differ between groups.
---From "Chapter 2 Passing the Baton"

The college-educated women in Cohort 1 embarked on a century-long journey toward both career and family.
In many ways, they worked and lived in a magical moment.
They established social welfare centers and served as public officials, doctors, prison administrators, and in many other roles.
They fought for the right to vote, they fought to end sweatshops and child labor, they fought for minimum wages and shorter working hours, and they fought for birth control.
But the only reason most of them were able to succeed was because they made choices (often at a young age).
They chose to pursue their passions, formed groups, and supported each other.
At the university, I taught young women with similar aspirations and provided them with a place to stay.
Their stories are so diverse that it is difficult to tell them as a single representative example.
---From "Chapter 3: The Fork in the Road"

Even before the Great Depression, there were laws prohibiting the employment of married women in many occupations, especially teaching.
But in the early 1930s, as unemployment soared, food ration lines grew longer, and economic frustration and despair grew, the enforcement of these systems became even more stringent.
The decade-long Great Depression led to more widespread and more aggressive enforcement of "married women employment bans" to exclude married women from good jobs.
The "ban on hiring married women" was a hiring and firing policy applied by businesses and government agencies (most importantly, school districts), and there were two types.
One is the 'recruitment ban', which excludes married women from employment, and the other is the 'retention ban' [marriage retirement], which fires unmarried employees who get married.
---From "Chapter 4: Middle Bridge Group"

We, the young women in Group 4, thought we could do much better.
We had a new vision for the future.
By prioritizing career over family, we hoped to increase our chances of achieving self-fulfillment, earning a high income, and entering long-term professional careers.
We would advance into higher social status and higher-paying jobs, occupations traditionally held by men, in greater numbers than any previous generation.
This meant that a significant investment of time was required immediately after graduating from college.
Again, this meant postponing marriage and, more importantly, childbirth.
We, a group of four, were able to do this.
This is because the women in Group 3 had something they didn't have: oral contraceptives.

---From "Chapter 6: The Quiet Revolution"

One day in 1998, someone who supported Lily left a piece of paper with very important information in her mailbox.
This information led to Lily's second, more infamous EEOC lawsuit.
The paper listed the wages other managers received.
Lily had no idea how much lower wages she was receiving compared to her male colleagues.
I only heard that it was slightly below the middle.
“Everything was top secret at Goodyear,” Lilly wrote in her autobiography years later.
Male managers who joined the same year as Lily started at the same wage.
But 20 years later, Lily was earning 15-40% less than them.
---From "Chapter 8: The Undisappearing Gap"

For 20 years, starting in 1960, women's income remained at 60% of men's.
This is the part that makes you realize why the “59 cents” slogan was so powerful.
But since then, this proportion has begun to increase, reaching 70% around 1990 and 75% around 2000 (again, this figure is based on median full-time worker earnings).
It's currently 81%.
The period when the ratio of women's income to men's income increased the fastest [and the gap narrowed the fastest] was the 1980s.

---From "Chapter 8: The Undisappearing Gap"