Editor's note: On the afternoon of October 9, Beijing time, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics were announced, and the prize was awarded to Harvard University economics professor Claudia Goldin for "improving our understanding of the outcomes of women's labor market."
Claudia Golding is the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Department of Economics, and her research covers a wide range of topics, including the female workforce, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Much of her research interprets the present from the perspective of the past and explores the origins of current concerns.
In the new book, Career or Family? In A Hundred Years of Women's Quest for Equality, she divides the college-educated women from the early 20th century to the present into five groups, delving into the obstacles they encounter in their careers, marriages, children, and other ideals, aspirations, and realities, as well as the evolution of generations. The following is an afterword to the book.
No era is fraught with uncertainty, and the coronavirus pandemic has shown this in an extreme way. The unemployment rate in the United States, which began with the pandemic, rose sharply and has now fallen significantly. Still, many jobs and small businesses are still struggling. At the time of writing, U.S. public schools are not yet fully open, and daycare centers are open and closed. Safe and effective vaccines are finally expected to be widely available, but not everyone is yet fully vaccinated. Normal life seems to be just around the corner, but this "just around" time is always changing.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a disaster. It takes lives, it takes jobs and it will affect generations to come. It exposes inequalities of race, class and gender in who is infected, who dies, who has to work on the front lines, who can learn, who is responsible for caring for children and the sick. It divides the people into rich and poor. It's a frightening magnifying glass that magnifies the burden on parents, reveals the trade-offs between work and home care, and exacerbates most of the problems that the five groups documented in this book encounter during their journeys.
The pandemic has had a huge impact on women. Women are often important workers at work and at home. Among them are new mothers with babbling babies, older mothers of teenagers who are bored with online education, poor single mothers who currently live on food supplies, highly educated women vying for promotions, and women of color who are at higher risk of virus infection who felt marginalized before the country's economy plummeted.
We are living through an unprecedented era. The staff who toiled on the front line were comparable to soldiers in wartime. However, front-line workers were never required to bring danger home before; We never need to shut down the economy to get it back working; The recession has never affected women more than men; Never before has the nursing sector been so intimately linked to the economic sphere. Today, women make up almost half of the workforce. We must ensure that they do not sacrifice their work for care, nor do they sacrifice time caring for their families because of their work.
This book focuses on the careers and families of female college graduates; They are used as a model because they have been most likely to achieve this dual goal over the past 120 years. They once made up only a small fraction of the population, accounting for less than 3 percent of young women a century ago. Today, female college graduates make up almost 45 percent of all women in their 20s in the United States.
The anxiety and dissatisfaction of college graduates is becoming increasingly pronounced. Newspapers and news feeds flooded newspapers and news feeds with alarmist predictions about the future of the fifth group of young members: "The pandemic will 'set our women back 10 years in the workplace'", "The pandemic may hurt a generation of working mothers", "How the coronavirus has caused a setback in the development of the female workforce". During the pandemic, people caring for children and others are struggling to invest more time, publishing academic papers, writing briefs, and dealing with demanding customers on Zoom video conferencing.
Based on these predictions, those who could have hoped for historic achievements in their careers and families are suddenly losing support. As food blogger Deb Perelman put it, "Let me say it out loud by default: In the COVID economy, you can only bring a baby or work." Will the women in the fifth group repeat the mistakes of the past and make the same compromises as the first group?
Needless to say, women are more likely than men to perceive the impact of the pandemic and the economic downturn, which is why there is a "she-cession." However, female college graduates are more likely to stay employed, or at least superficially so, than less educated women. Education enables them to work from home, which protects their health and employment.
Compared with the same period in 2019, the labor force participation rate of female college graduates aged 25~34 with preschool children (under 5 years old) in the fall and winter of 2020 decreased by only 1.2 percentage points (base figure is 75%). However, the proportion of mothers aged 35~44 with children of primary and secondary school age (5~13 years old) decreased by 4.9 percentage points (base figure 86%), which is a considerable decline. Non-university students, with or without children, have seen their labor force participation rate fall sharply because they are employed in the most vulnerable industries.
The above image doesn't seem like the "apocalyptic" scenario that the headlines ported, but the data does show that the cracks may widen over time. Re-entering the labour market may be difficult, and lack of work experience will also affect earnings later in life. Even for those who hold jobs, many ask whether mothers are disadvantaged in choosing to secure partnership, tenure and first promotion. In academia, mothers have published fewer papers in the past year than men and women without school-age children. Moreover, the data does not disclose the frustration and frustration of the crowd, which for many people means "working from hell".
Dissatisfaction
We explore the aspirations of female college graduates a century ago, faced with the choice of family or career, and faced many restrictions, even in prosperous times. Over the decades, barriers have been removed. We welcome female college graduates of the '70s who increasingly aspire to have a career and a family at the same time, but who understand that this sequence must be followed to achieve both. Finally, we looked at women in the 90s of the 20th century, who were further educated, had increased career opportunities, and were able to fulfill their ambitions more openly. They openly say they want to reap career and family success, and they want to achieve both, without following a specific order. They have made further progress in both areas over the past few decades.
But nearly a decade before the coronavirus hit the United States, women were already voicing widespread discontent. Phrases such as "sex discrimination" and "gender discrimination" found in the news media suggest growing grievances with wage inequality and resistance to sexual harassment.
After 2010, several high-profile incidents made headlines, such as Bao Kangru's lawsuit against employer Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination, and the pay gap between male and female professional football players. Cases of the naked gender wage gap in Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley have also been exposed. Women's discontent continued unabated as problems arose during the 2016 presidential campaigns for Hillary and Trump, particularly the lewd rhetoric in "Access Hollywood" and their apparent lack of influence on the outcome of the election. The coverage of these events triggered the second peak moment of gender discontent in the 20th century (to paraphrase the press reports). The first peak was in the first half of the 70s of the 20th century.
60 years ago, in the 60s of the 20th century, the New York Times almost never mentioned "sexism"; Decades later, the term "sexism" became known. Around 1971, articles about "sexism" began to skyrocket, and by 1975, articles containing the word had reached a high point. The use of the word then declined intermittently, and fell 35 years later, around 2010, to a fifth of the 1975 level.
But, just as discontent suddenly churned in the early 70s of the 20th century, it surged again in the second decade of the 21st century, climbing to all-time highs.
The reasons for the surge in discontent in the early 70s of the 20th century are not difficult to understand. At that time, the gender wage gap was really huge. Women earn 59 percent of men's, and the rate stays at this poor level for a long time. Women have always been excluded from societies, restaurants, bars, and have only just been admitted to elite national colleges. After an era of protest movements ranging from civil rights to anti-war protests, the Education Act Amendment to Title IX of 1972 finally guaranteed women equal rights in education and sports. These times are exhilarating, with liberating women and awareness-raising groups blossoming everywhere. Women finally have a voice, and they use it to voice their grievances.
But why, in the second decade of the 21st century, just as women are making great gains in employment, income, and education, is there a similar level of dissatisfaction and frustration in news articles?
Because people's expectations have risen, so have their aspirations. Women, especially female college graduates, pretend that they will be able to embrace career and family. The less educated insist they should be treated fairly in the labour market. College graduates aspire
Attainment of the same accomplishments as a male spouse. There is a vision of achieving not only gender equality in the workplace, but also conjugal equity in the family.
As we can see, in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century, the gender pay gap for all workers narrowed significantly, but from the 90s, the income gap among university graduates began to stagnate. Rising income inequality means that those at the top are taking advantage at the expense of others, and a disproportionately high proportion of male college graduates are in this rare group.
Greedy work becomes more greedy, and women with caregiving responsibilities have to struggle to keep up.
Care
All of the above has already appeared in the "pre-corona era". In March 2020, very urgently and suddenly, parents were told that school-age children were going to stay home. Nurseries are all closed. My Harvard undergraduates all went for spring break, and only a fraction returned to school. Employees are required to work from home unless DHS deems them "essential." At this point, the entire United States has entered the "new crown period".
The economic catastrophe that followed the pandemic affected women more than men, and the recession would not have been the case. Women work mainly in the service sector, which has been protected from offshoring, China's trade shocks and automation. But today, service jobs in the hospitality, tourism, personal services, catering and retail industries have been hit hard. In a world of social distancing, in-person service doesn't work, not to mention that working indoors is worse than working outdoors. The construction industry has rebounded; Most manufacturing industries are also doing well. The most affected groups of women are single mothers and women with less than a college degree. And, as I've already pointed out, unemployment among female college graduates is soaring, while the labor force participation rate is declining.
As in the pre-Covid era, parents of college graduates have a better time than others because they are better able to work from home. According to estimates based on occupational characteristics, before the new crown epidemic, about 62% of professional women (25~64 years old) who graduated from college could work from home. Current census data from May 2020 shows that about 60% of women have worked remotely, about the same proportion as their male counterparts. Of women with some college education, 42 percent were able to work from home, compared with 34 percent of women who had not attended college. In May 2020, the actual percentage of non-college-graduating women who claimed to work remotely was only 23%.
Given the occupations of the group of university graduates, they are ready for lockdown. People without college degrees are destined to be the majority of important front-line workers, either furloughed or laid off. The unemployment rate for college graduates is consistently the lowest among the workforce. In April 2020, the lowest economic month after the outbreak, the national unemployment rate hit a double-digit peak, with the unemployment rate of female college graduates aged 35~44 being 7%, and another 5% of women "having a job but not going to work". The unemployment rate for non-college graduates is more than double that at 17 percent, and another 10 percent of women "have a job but don't go to work."
During the pandemic, the ability to work from home has become very important. However, working from home still means that employees are assumed to be able to work during irregular hours and can work when the client or manager wants the work done. But working from home can be constantly disrupted.
For most parents with preschool and school-age children, the need for time in families during the pandemic is huge. Everyone has to work harder at home. For those with children, homes have become daycare centers and schools during the pandemic. And if a spouse or child is sick, home is a clinic and a hospital. The amount of time individuals spend uninterrupted work in paid work has been drastically reduced.
At the time of writing, the United States is in what I call a post-COVID hybrid period, because in many ways it is a "post-COVID era," but it is still in the "COVID era." A number of companies, offices and institutions are already open, as have some schools and day-care institutions. However, many schools are only partially open, and some are still teaching entirely remotely. For couples with children, partial school opening or remote classes mean that the child stays at home, and if you're lucky, a parent stays at home to supervise learning. If history or the journey we've just gone through is any guide, then the parent is probably a woman.
How much time spent caring for children and paid work has decreased during the pandemic is not known in a large nationally representative sample. Routine studies on time use, such as the American Time Use Survey, were suspended in March 2020 and did not restart until May. These data will not be available for some time.
Based on the American Time Use Survey, I created a "pre-COVID era" (pre-pandemic years) assessment for "sample households" of working college graduates with at least one child under the age of 18. Before lockdown, mothers in the sample families did an average of 61% of childcare (they also did nearly 70% of household chores such as food preparation, cleaning, and washing). As for mothers of the same type who do not work, the figure is 74 per cent.
During the lockdown, children were suspended from school, childcare for preschoolers was limited, many caregivers were forced to take leave, and parents' total investment time increased significantly. Parents take over the teacher's place, supervise their children's school hours and help them with their homework; The teacher suddenly became a distant screen image.
The immediate impact of the lockdown on mothers in the sample families was that their total time with their children doubled. But in reality, the proportion of mothers caring for their children in two-parent households has decreased, as fathers are also staying at home and they spend much more time caring for their children than before the lockdown. The April 2020 survey showed a 1.54-fold increase in the amount of time mothers spend caring for their children and a 1.9-fold increase in the time fathers spend looking after their children. In addition, each parent with at least one child of elementary or junior high school age is allocated about four additional hours per week to supervise their child's distance learning. Parents with the youngest child in high school add about 2 hours to each parent.
There is no doubt that before lockdown, caring for babies took the most time. Before lockdown, couples with babies spent 42 hours a week caring for their babies; Maternal care accounted for 66 per cent of these. During lockdown, the total number of hours per week skyrocketed to 70 hours. However, although the number of hours spent caring for newborns increased from 28 to 43 hours, the proportion fell to 61 per cent.
For parents whose youngest child is in primary or secondary school, the amount of time mothers spend per week on caring for their children and their distance education increases from approximately 9 to 17 hours. However, as in the previous case, the amount of care time spent by both parents increased significantly during the lockdown, while the proportion of childcare and distance education time spent by mothers fell from nearly 60% to just over 50%. The lockdown appears to be in favour of couples' equity, as women's share of total time spent in childcare and distance education has declined, and the corresponding proportion of men has risen. Perhaps when it's all over, men will want to spend more time with their children and be willing to dedicate more time to the family. But what the real situation is, we do not know.
What we do know for sure is that despite the decline in the share of care time held by mothers in two-parent households, the overall burden of childcare and housework remains heavy. For fathers, it was almost as overwhelming. However, because women take on more daily household chores, such as cooking and laundry, their time for paid work is greatly reduced. A UK survey estimated that working mothers were interrupted during half of their paid working hours in April 2020.
Will things change when some schools, many nurseries and some companies reopen during the post-COVID and COVID times? As certain childcare services and schooling have been opened, total childcare demand should be between the peak of the Covid era and the lower levels of the pre-Covid era.
While there is no conclusive evidence, there is reason to believe that women's total childcare burden has remained roughly the same, while their share of the total burden has increased. The reason is that the opening of all schools and child care centers in the United States will be more cautious than the workplace; As a result, some employees were able to resume all or part of their previous working hours. However, someone has to be at home to take care of the children. Women's benefits from more childcare and school openings are offset by spouses' occasional return to work.
This benefit is neither even nor stable. Day-care facilities for pre-school children have largely reopened, and many families have rehired childcare workers who have been forced to take leave. But even into the late March 2021 school year, as I write these words, many of the nation's largest school districts are still not fully open, even though each has plans to fully open "soon." Some schools opened and then closed abruptly, and thousands of children were sent home. Exhausted families eventually formed real or virtual "learning pods" under the leadership of parents or paid tutors.
With the reopening of companies, offices and institutions, workers can leave home to work as they used to (albeit with a slight slight caution). But for families with children, if the school is still partially remote, then one parent still needs to be home part of the time, that is, at least one person must remain at home.
Every parent may want to return to the office for some reason. People who go to work in the office can learn more, reach more profitable customers, participate in more interesting projects; You can also communicate face-to-face with colleagues, work more effectively, without distractions, and away from the noise of children learning multiplication tables.
Couples can continue to work from home, just like Isabel and Lucas, each moving into a highly flexible position. But if they do, they will give up some of their income just like Isabel and Lucas. If one parent works from home and one returns to the office, their income may not change immediately. But parents who eventually return to the office, even part-time, will benefit. While there is a lot of speculation, it's not clear what the outcome of this destructive forced experiment will be.
Again, as we know from history, the parent who will return to the new "old normal" and work in the office (even if only for a small part) is likely to be a man. But this is still unknown. We know from the particular problems revealed by the current population survey that as of September 2020, about 60% of college graduates have returned to work at least part of the time. We also know that more men than women are returning to work. However, the evidence remains weak. There is always a silver lining that our gender norms will be broken by attempts to force working from home and that penalties for not going to the office will be reduced.
In some areas, there is a lot of pressure for employees to return to the office. David Solomon of Goldman Sachs encourages traders to return to headquarters. Sergio Ermotti, CEO of UBS, said: "If employees stay home, it will be particularly difficult for banks to cohesively create and maintain corporate culture. The CEO of a large real estate company put it in a slightly utilitarian tone: "People who don't go to work in the workplace may miss out on opportunities." ”
Although the total time spent caring for children in the sample families has decreased as the economy has been slow, hesitant and incomplete to open, the burden on women is likely to remain unchanged. As a result, women in sample households spent about 1.7 times more time on childcare and distance education during the COVID period and in the post-COVID-COVID hybrid era than in the pre-Covid era. Due to the increase in total working hours and the partial return of helping partners to the office, the proportion of total childcare time taken by working women who graduated from college has risen from about 60% in the pre-COVID era to about 73% in the post-COVID hybrid era.
The inequality in the division of labor in childcare did not become apparent yesterday, and the labor market did not suddenly experience fierce competition in "go up or go". Precisely, it was the coronavirus pandemic that amplified their impact. Mothers have or will likely experience greater setbacks at work and career than husbands (or partners) and fathers of their children.
Career or Family? A Hundred Years of Women's Quest for Equality" book cover
countermeasure
For female college graduates, much of the economic blow stemmed from the shutdown of the nursing sector. Without a well-functioning nursing sector, the economic sector will struggle. If schools continue to close, a large proportion of parents, mainly women, will find it difficult to work effectively.
It doesn't even work at all. During this major recession, the nursing sector will for the first time decide the fate of the economic sector. This was not the case in previous periods of severe economic downturns. But that's true today, because women make up almost half of the U.S. workforce.
Unemployment and economic output losses during the Great Depression of the 2030s were more severe than the pandemic. In 1935, during the New Deal, the Public Works Promotion Agency (WPA) began to set up day nurseries for children aged 2~4 from low-income families. The program is multi-pronged: ensuring that the poorest and most vulnerable Americans have access to nutritious diets and health care and learn basic skills; Employ teachers and school nurses who are forced to furlough. Although the Public Works Promotion Department's nursery allows parents to work, the project was not set up with this policy objective in mind.
In the 2030s, the intricate links between the nursing sector and the economic sector were not appreciated. In fact, the Omnibus Social Security Act of 1935 specifically included Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1962. This was once a benefit that we are familiar with. Minor Child Assistance pays women who do not work, rather than subsidizing nurseries so that women can work. Because black women have a greater workload than white women, the project primarily assists white women. At the time, no one thought that white women should work and earn money. Instead, the idea is that poor white children should be cared for by their mothers, who should be paid for it. No one mentions such a concept anymore.
In the 2030s, the labor force participation rate of mothers (especially white mothers) was very low, and women's employment was not seen as an important economic lever at all. As can be seen, women with able-bodied husbands are not expected or encouraged to work outside the home, and marriage restrictions and social norms discourage it. It was not until World War II that the United States linked the economic sector with the nursing sector, but only as an emergency stopgap measure.
The Lanham Act, passed in 1943, set up daycare centers for the 2~4-year-old children of working mothers, many of whom were employed by war-related companies (including the famous Caesar Shipyard). Without these daycare centres, most women with preschoolers would not be able to work and the fighting would be hampered. To date, the Lanham Act is the only federal legislation that provides child care facilities nationwide for children of working mothers, regardless of their income.
Today, the nursing sector and the economic sector are clearly interdependent. There has been widespread awareness that many women will not be able to work effectively until schools open full-time, and many will not even be able to work at all.
The United States has never believed that caring for young children is a social responsibility like Denmark, France, Sweden and other countries; In those countries, childcare is heavily subsidized, and women's labor force participation rates are higher than in the United States. Before the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, there were some changes in relevant policies in the United States. Six states have extended family and sick leave, and the District of Columbia and more than a dozen other state legislatures have introduced similar legislation. Many companies, even low-wage companies like Walmart, have adopted family leave policies. Preschool programs have expanded in states and municipalities, and after-school programs have kept pace.
Today, involving men in childcare is a key part of the problem, but in the past, this was not the case. In the past, even the most supportive husbands could not easily bypass the constraints and obstacles that corporations, institutions, and governments could sustain. Eleanora Frances Bliss Knopf, who received her doctorate in geology in 1912, married Adolf, a geologist and professor at Yale University, but failed to get a teaching position because Yale did not hire women. She switched to working for the U.S. Geological Survey, often under the command of her husband's office. In his commemoration, people wrote, "Both were authorities in different fields." Yet there was a mountain named after him, and she had nothing. Some successful women are employed by their husbands' companies or set up their own companies. In 1914, Jennie Loitman Barron passed her bar exam and started a law firm. After marrying her childhood sweetheart (fortunately, he was also a lawyer), the two married each other, had three children, and in 1918 opened the Barron & Barrons, a company she maintained until 1934, when she was appointed assistant attorney general of Massachusetts. There is also the aforementioned Sadie Mossel Alexander, who also worked in her husband's law firm.
Few women have the courage and financial means to break free from a repressed marriage, but Nora Blatch, granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is one of them. Nora was the first woman in the United States to earn a degree in civil engineering and the first to earn an engineering degree from Cornell University. After divorcing Lee de Forest, the inventor of the vacuum triode (because he wanted her to quit her job), she married Morgan Barney, a naval architect, in 1919. But the vast majority of married women who want to pursue a career, or even just a job, have not escaped the bondage of marriage, and they are unknown in the available records.
In the 50s of the 20th century, more positions opened their doors to married women. The third group of members is increasingly capable of starting a family and then having a job or even a career. For some husbands, it's hard to resist the temptation to have a second income to pay their mortgage and send their children to college. As women's education has increased, many men have paid a terrible price for opposing their wives to have careers. They finally relented. In some very specific cases, this is not even just a concession.
Marty Ginsburg admired his talented wife, Ruth. At one point, he said: "I think the most important thing I've ever done is to get Ruth to do what she wants to do. "In many ways, though, they're still typical third-group couples." They met at university, married in 1954, and had their first child a year later. To follow Marty to New York, Rouse even transferred from Harvard to Columbia Law School, and "when Marty was bent on becoming a partner in a New York law firm within five years," Ruth took over everything in the family. But that's the end of the comparison with contemporaries. In the third group of majorities, the wife should be the support of the husband.
In 1964, 75 percent of the 1961 graduating class agreed that men's careers took precedence over women's. But the change soon began. By 1980, about 60 per cent of university graduates (male and female, up from 25 per cent in 1964) believed that husbands and wives should have equal opportunities to succeed in their careers (or get a "good job"). By 1998, the proportion of university graduates advocating equal opportunity exceeded 85 per cent. This was the last time this question was asked in the survey.
When wives began to claim that they wanted to own their own careers, men quickly turned to the goal of supporting their wives. Aspirations and goals have changed dramatically. But there are other hurdles to overcome in reality, which are no longer as obvious as those encountered by our earlier groups, but are just as solid.
For women to have careers, families, and fairness, fathers need to work the same as women, and they must take on household chores so that women can focus on work. Some capable couples do this by switching people with their main careers. Karen Quintos, Dell's chief customer officer (CCO), and her husband "had to compromise with each other." Jules Pieri, founder and CEO of product launch platform Grommet, described her family life as a "ballet" in which she and her husband "take turns taking the lead."
Marissa Mayer, who is known to have given birth to twins while serving as CEO of Yahoo, noted that when the child is young, women usually step back a little, but then "her career is about to take off." However, it turns out that many people who restart their careers later in life never achieve great success. Compared with men, women with children have increased their employment rates and incomes in their forties and fifties, but they have never been able to catch up with their male colleagues. Work may be restored, but careers often fail to take off.
Douglas Emhoff is the perfect role model. This first "second gentleman" is doing what women have always done: providing personal support to those who lead our country, giving them shoulders, tissues, listening, empathy, and help. As a strong man who happened to be married to the Vice President of the United States and Superwoman, he showed men how to be proud, not jealous, and how to help, not obstruct. The more such men, the merrier.
We need men to help at work, encourage male colleagues to take parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize child care, and get companies to change the way greedy works so that companies understand that family is more valuable than work. Unless you bring a man with you on the "rest of the journey", dreams will not come true and wishes will not be easily fulfilled.
We will finally emerge from the pandemic. But it will take a long time to return workplaces, restaurants, cinemas, airplanes, hotels, parties, stadiums, weddings and even life itself to their pre-Covid days. The journey of female university graduates will continue. We don't know what damage this will do to the careers of freshmen; It is also unclear whether the experiment of forcing both parents to work from home will shake gender norms and change the way of working. However, we do know what has been achieved in the past and what has hindered and still hinders women's progress.
We have traveled a journey from the first group of members choosing between career and family, to the desire of the fifth group to achieve both, and often success. Sadie Mossel Alexander earned an advanced degree but failed to find a job in her chosen field. Hazel Kelke and Margaret Reed implicitly chose career over family because they can't have both. Most people accept the consequences of the constraints of their time, but others, such as Dorothy Wolf Douglas, grow stubbornly despite the thorns. As for Janet Rankin and Amelia Earhart, they sometimes sang and sometimes lost.
Some people live long enough to enjoy a continuous life that changes with the times, like Ida Comstock, who entered marriage in her 60s. Many of the third group were typical baby boomer mothers, such as Irma Bonbeck, Jenny Kirkpatrick, Phyllis Schrafley, and Betty Friedan, who moved with the times and eventually even rewrote history.
Many face government laws, regulations and institutional policies that restrict women's employment. Some people rose up and eventually won, like Anita Randy and Mildred Basdon, whom we saw working to help break down the school's marriage restrictions after World War II.
Margaret Sanger and Catherine Dexter McCormick, the "mothers of the pill," fueled the "silent revolution" and made the fourth group stand out from the third. Mary Moore's Mary Richards represents a new independent group of young women who dare to postpone marriage and childbearing. But like many women, Mary was treated differently in the workplace. Lily Ledbet endured more: sexual harassment, physical and psychological harm, employment discrimination, and pay inequality. She survived decades of hardship and finally declared victory.
However, we know that workplace treatment is not the only issue. Another issue is conjugal fairness in the family. Too many women with careers "forget to have children," as Tini Fey has portrayed on television and in the movies.
The fourth group postponed marriage and family to put career first. Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton at the age of 28. The fifth group further raised the age of marriage. Clinton's successor, Senator Tianna Lu of New York, is 35 years old and married Jonathan Gillibrand. Amy Klobuchar married at the age of 33. Kamala Harris, who broke many firsts and was just sworn in as vice president of the United States, married at the age of 50.
Janet Rankin's journey sheds light on issues and reveals why highly educated and trained women need to keep struggling to progress like their male counterparts. The burden of raising children, caring for the elderly, and protecting the family falls on women's shoulders. Work so greedy and work more
Much, no hard work. In a world rife with gender norms, couples with children can only optimize.
Is our remote work attempt a shot in the arm to reduce the cost of work flexibility? The shift to remote work has been smoother than expected, with most workers expressing a willingness to continue practicing remotely. When working from home, it's hard for half of people with school-age children to work uninterrupted, but that should get better as schools reopen in full force. Among college graduates working from home, 46% have more flexibility in choosing working hours. At least in the short term, the cost of flexibility for employees does seem to be declining.
After the pandemic, most people who can work from home claim to be willing to work from home at least two days a week. But it's unclear how this will affect productivity and overall costs. While remote workers believe they have increased productivity, the long-term impact remains to be seen. Innovation requires teamwork to spark ideas. And while many companies are shrinking office space to save costs, some have long stated that people who return to the office for more days a week will benefit more.
Like many other issues today, they are fretting with uncertainty. But there is still hope that by exposing gaps and revealing new ways of working and caring, our "forced experiments" can trigger far-reaching change. As the world slowly emerges from the pandemic, schools are still operating remotely and offices are only partially open, and we are witnessing in real time how these conditions are eroding women's careers. Margaret Reed, the "ancient" whom I had long overlooked, knew all too well the value of the nursing sector to the economic sector. Now, it's time to pay more attention to the baton passed by her and many others. But we also have to correct the work system and repave the way forward, so that my former students and others can have their own careers and a partner who thinks what they want.