Career and Family

Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity

By: Claudia Goldin

Narrated by: Nancy Crane

Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics

This audiobook narrated by Nancy Crane traces women’s journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home.

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. This book traces 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. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her books include Women Working Longer, The Race between Education and Technology, The Defining Moment, and Understanding the Gender Gap. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Twitter @PikaGoldin

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2021 Claudia Goldin (P)2021 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“This book is a must-read, especially for anyone balancing parenting with a career and frustrated with the disparate challenge on women in doing so. It is a powerful look at the history and data of the generations of women who have faced this challenge and the progress they made, and uses this history and data to show the way toward meaningful progress.” (Emily Oster, author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet)

Passionate writing of economics and social phenomena

I’m deeply thankful with Audible for having this book available. Please, continue adding these academic titles. Even more thankful I am to Claudia Goldin for making this such an entertaining work, I cannot believe that I just heard it all, also, for being so objective with the data, and for being so clear with it to the point that I actually wouldn’t have minded to hear more numbers and percentages. Last, but not least, thank you to the reader who made me feel both like I was listening to the author and as I was listening to a fellow woman, passionate about this issue. Great listen.

Claudia Golden has laid out the facts and history that even a wave 3 feminist didn’t fully grasp. I enjoyed every minute.

The presentation of much data in a way that brings it alive is the strength of this work. By a woman who won a Nobel Prize for it.

A very interesting listen

The book provides a seemingly objective consideration of the history and causes of the trade-offs college-educated women have had to make between career and family, the (many) causes of the gender pay gap, and why many simple proposed fixes based on assumptions about the major causes would be unlikely to make a big difference, as the things they target are often not major causes of the gap.

A weakness of the book is its sole focus on college-educated women even in eras when fairly few women received college degrees. This was probably partly caused by the limited availability of data, but was also a choice by the author based on the expectation that such women had more choices. It would have been nice to hear what she could discern from the data on women who did not have college educations.

Enlightening

Statistics heavy, but very interesting. Story picks up significantly towards the end of the book. It's a somewhat difficult casual listen but very thorough research and eye opening concepts.