Learning About Claudia Goldin

I had not heard of economist Claudia Goldin until she won the Nobel Prize last week. This op-ed from the Los Angeles Times gives a good overview of some of her work.

It highlights a recent paper by Goldin, in which she wrote that the years between 1963 and 1973 were the high point for women's rights in the U.S. During those 10 years, nearly half of the 155 most important changes happened.

Immediately after that, as we know, there was a "powerful anti-women's rights movement that rapidly joined with the antiabortion and anti-gay/woke lobbies to remain a potent force in America to this day." That quote brings to mind Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, of course.

The part of the article I found the most personally interesting was the section that described a lecture Goldin gave in 2020 called “Journey Across a Century of Women.” In it, she analyzed data from the past 150 years to segment the work and family outcomes of the college-educated women born between 1878 and 1978 into five distinct groups:

• Women born 1878 – 1897 "chose families or careers."
• Women born 1898 – 1923 "had jobs then families."
• Women born 1924 – 1943 "had families then jobs."
• Women born 1944 – 1957 "had careers then families."
• Women born 1958 – 1978 "expect to have careers and families at the same time."

My own observation of that last segment is that the break point in the Baby Boom is mushier than that, which may be true about all the transition points. But overall, I think these findings are fairly accurate at the population level. Which means there are exceptions (think Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, born in 1932, who had a family and a career at the same time), but the majority or even the vast majority probably fit.

In my own family's case:

• My mother's mother, born in 1903, taught school for a few years, then stopped paid work after marriage and family. She returned to paid work after her children were grown.
• My mother, born in 1932, married after a year of graduate school and never had a full-time job before that. She did work full-time for a year or two when I was in early elementary school, but didn't do paid work again until we were all out of high school.  
• My sisters and I were born from 1956 to 1961 and all expected to have jobs (careers) and families at the same time. I don't think it was any different for the oldest of us than the youngest. Though only one of us had what would be considered a consistent career trajectory.

I'm glad the Nobel Committee selected Goldin for the prize. This is a part of economics that's a bit less dismal than usual.