Review of Goldin, Claudia. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021, xii + 344 pp.

Abstract

In a world of greedy jobs, gender equity is expensive within families. This is the main takeaway of Claudia Goldin's book Career and Family. Goldin explains how workplace success often requires burning the midnight oil, investing in higher education, and devoting spare time to developing one's career. However, even when women are allowed to work in these 'greedy jobs', they are often incompatible with the care burdens they are expected to carry, which often leads to pay inequities. Goldin artfully describes how these tensions have evolved in the past century for one specific group: women with higher education in the United States.Goldin begins her book by introducing her definition of 'greedy work', that is, careers that require one be on call at home, produce constant cerebral output, and never tune out of work. Because of family obligation and childcare, couples are often faced with a choice between a marriage of equals or a marriage with more money, where one takes on greedy work and the other flexible work.Goldin then outlines the five cohorts of college-graduate women and discusses each of their experiences with work and family in the subsequent chapters, often using unique historical data. The first cohort (women who graduated college in 1890s-1910s) are those who Goldin describes as having to choose between family or career: very few were able to have both. The second group, women graduating in the next two decades, are marked as having a job and then a family. Women graduating college in the 1950s are a group which commonly had a family and then a job. In these chapters, Goldin indicates differences between job and career, noting that a career offers advancement and intellectual fulfillment while a job is simply a way to earn money. Goldin then turns to the fourth cohort: women graduating from college in the 1970s, which she classifies as having a career and then a family. It is not until the fifth group, women graduating in the 1980s and 1990s, that college-educated women are able to have a career and a family in Goldin's eyes.