Ever since its 1970s heyday, feminism has been in a co-dependent relationship with capitalism. Marxist-influenced radicals may have wanted to smash the entire system and build a matriarchal-socialist utopia in its place. But a more prominent, and ultimately triumphant, sister-cadre looked at the economic order around them and wanted to lean in — and lean in hard. They went to business school and law school, rose to partner, pitched Silicon Valley venture-capital big shots, got tenure, and took over the C-Suite at major media companies. Capitalists were happy; they had a large pool of talented new workers. And to an extent, women were happy; they had new opportunities to use their brains and talents, to have their own bank accounts, and to gain social status. But there was a glitch in this largely successful alliance: a gender wage and wealth gap that refused to go away.
No one has done a more impressive job of mining the details of these gaps than Claudia Goldin, Harvard economist and author of the deftly researched but disappointing Career and Family. The book is not a standard-issue exercise in feminist finger-pointing. There is no talk of misogyny, and the word “sexism” makes only scattered appearances. On the contrary, Goldin lays out truths that some feminist activists will find inconvenient. Discrimination exists, the professor writes, but it accounts for only 20 percent of the wage gap; a world wiped squeaky clean of sexism would still have women earning considerably less than men. Training more women to compete in STEM fields won’t change the numbers all that much either; occupational differences determine only a third of the existing gap. Goldin’s conclusion, one that may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the relentless warnings about the gender wage gap, is that women are now paid the same as men for the same work once you factor in position and hours logged. The gaps that do remain cannot be closed by individual men and women or even by government policies.
An economic historian as well as a labor economist, Goldin shows how this equality evolved over a century of profound technological, social, and legal change. At the turn of the 20th century, few women even dreamt of having it all — as the combination of career and family is half-ironically called — much less actually achieved that end. Thirty percent of women who did manage to get a college degree never married, a far lower rate of marriage than in the general population of women, 10 percent of whom remained single; only half of those graduates ever had children. College education was a rare prize for men at the time and even more so for women. At any rate, a degree was of limited use to the second sex. Many law, business, and medical schools refused to let them in their classrooms; companies frequently had rules against hiring married women; those with children would never have gotten through the front door. Nepotism rules prevented couples from working in the same department or firm.
By mid century, and especially after World War II upended ordinary life, marriage bars and nepotism rules had disappeared from the American scene. As technological advances such as washing machines, central heating, and refrigerators made running a household less labor-intensive, women became a more familiar sight in workplaces, particularly in America’s booming white-collar sector. Goldin corrects the myth, memorialized in iconic 1950s TV shows such as Father Knows Best and in Betty Friedan’s pioneering The Feminine Mystique, that women of the time rarely took off their aprons. In mid century, most college-educated women were working full-time within six months after graduation, and though they did leave the workforce when they had children, they returned in large numbers as their kids got older.
Of course, “the pill” gave women the strongest push into the workplace. By the 1970s, when the pharmaceutical had become so widely used and so essential as to earn its title, young American women had the chance to edit the old life script. Well-to-do women would go to college, plunge headlong into their careers, and only then marry and have children — if they felt like it. While their working mothers might have aimed for teaching, library science, or maybe social work, careers that were neither terribly taxing nor high in status, the new career-oriented women swept into formerly male-dominated and time-consuming occupations. Women’s share of business majors quadrupled, and the number of women going to law school rose steadily until they reached full parity with men in 2000. There were similar gender shifts in medical, dental, and veterinary schools. Yet none of this striving stopped them from embracing traditional family life (though the author calculates that about 50 percent of college-educated women now need the help of reproductive technologies to have children). In the early 20th century, educated women were considerably less likely to be married with children than their less-educated sisters. These days, they are more likely to be married with children.
From a historical perspective, the “century-long journey” toward a more flexible work–family script for women, or at least college-educated women, culminated in one of the most consequential social shifts ever known. But for the author, we are still well short of “equity,” in her mind the ultimate destination of women’s “journey.” By equity, Goldin, and no doubt many in her intended audience, seems to mean perfect parity between men and women, and individual husbands and wives, in terms of hours worked and children cared for, promotions earned, and money grossed. And in fact, as she explains, young women today do start their careers earning the same as comparable men. However, once children come along, income and seniority gaps emerge, even while women who never have children have wage and career trajectories much like those of similarly trained men. As parents try to cope with the conflicting demands of work dinners and breakfast meetings on the one hand, and, on the other, pediatrician’s appointments, soccer matches, and sick days, it is women who tend to switch to jobs and companies that give them more flexibility but, over time, lower pay, as they sacrifice the larger ambitions of their pre-maternal youth.
Do women regret those forgone dreams? Do they share Goldin’s goal of couple equity über alles? She appears indifferent to these questions, though there’s plenty of evidence pointing to an inconvenient answer. Surveys repeatedly show that American women prefer part-time work far more than men do. Part-time work is common among EU women as well, including in Nordic countries with a cornucopia of family-friendly policies. Goldin herself gives an example of women’s different priorities in her discussion of pharmacy, a field she views as a model for gender equity. Because the profession has restructured workplaces so colleagues can tag-team and work more-customizable hours, and because the owner-run pharmacies of the past have given way to corporatized chains, women pharmacists, now half of that labor force, get paid the same per hour as male pharmacists. Yet women pharmacists still choose to work fewer hours than men, in part, Goldin speculates, because of lower opportunity costs, since more hours don’t mean higher hourly pay. That gives women pharmacists permission to cut back — and that’s exactly what they do. In Goldin’s terms this should be a problem, since mommy pharmacists still bring home a smaller paycheck than daddy pharmacists.
That Goldin fails to grapple with the implication of the hours gap — that women and men might have different preferences rather than mere obeisance to “outdated gender norms” — is a blot on Career and Family’s otherwise thoughtful commentary and smart research. The subject and heroines of her book are college-educated career women of ambition like herself. That topic is worthy of attention; modern societies have an interest in rewarding the talents and supporting the productive ambitions of their citizens. But the vantage point of a rarefied group of older professional-class women makes the book feel out of step with a time when many young adults are questioning the meritocratic tournament that has them swimming in debt, emotionally frazzled, and deeply resentful of a system that has promised so much more than it is delivering. Lean-in, corporate feminism is going out of style. “The Girlboss Has Left the Building” was the witty title of a 2020 Atlantic article about disillusioned young female entrepreneurs. Some elite young women, questioning capitalism itself, the system that has given them opportunities to become girlbosses, are even flirting with socialism.
Equity should be a distant concern when the future both of careers and families is so fragile.
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Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of several books, most recently The New Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in National Review