Thursday 3 April 2014

A grand gender convergence: its last chapter

is the title of a new paper by Claudia Goldin in the American Economic Review (104(4): 1091-1119.) which looks at the gender gap in pay. The abstract reads,
The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the "last" chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor market? The answer may come as a surprise. The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn't hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours. Such change has taken off in various sectors, such as technology, science, and health, but is less apparent in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds.
Presumably firms  reward individuals who labour long hours and work particular hours because it is profit maximising for them to do so and thus this may be a feature of the particular industries in which it occurs. If so this could be a difficult thing to change, it would take either a change in the cost structure of the industry, what would bring about such a change?, or a change on the demand side, that is, customers would have to start demanding a different set of goods or services. Why would they do so?

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