Claudia Goldin on Career and Family

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. Claudia Goldin, who has won this year's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences traces in her book Career and Family how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

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Your book is about the aspirations of women for career and family, today and in the past. Let's begin with the obvious: Will there ever be "equity" for women?

Equity is often defined to mean equal earnings for men and women in the same job or between comparable individuals. At the rate we have been going, some calculate that this type of equity will not be achieved in anyone's lifetime. That isn't a hopeful answer. But, rather than take the current circumstances as given and extrapolate, we have to understand what causes this inequity. The gender earnings gap, as it is called, is a lot more than a difference in earnings.

Inequity is in two spheres: that of career and that of family. They are two sides of the same coin. If we can achieve equity within families, we will have a much better chance of achieving gender earnings equality at work. The reason is that children take time. Careers take time. If women do more of the childcare (and household maintenance and eldercare), then they have less time for their careers. They put in fewer hours, they take less demanding jobs and, in consequence, they earn less.

Inequities in caregiving are rooted in history, family norms, and individual preferences. But, even couples who would like to have 50-50 relationships can't. The reason is "greedy work."

So, the gender earnings gap is largely emerging from outside the workplace but is reinforced and widened by factors termed "greedy work" within the workplace. What do you mean by "greedy work"?