A recent Freakonomics Radio episode called “The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap” explains why discrimination alone can’t account for our nation’s current 23% wage difference between men and women. Host Stephen Dubner spoke with Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University about what she calls “temporal flexibility,” which she sees as the more prominent driver of the gender pay gap. This “temporal flexibility,” as Goldin puts it, is the need (or desire) to have flexibility in one’s work, and this hugely impacts an employer’s decision of who to hire.
Based on Goldin’s studies, it is evident that this temporal flexibility is negatively impacting women’s ability to get and maintain jobs and advance their personal careers. Take the case of both a man and a woman graduating with a law degree, for example. Goldin’s research showed that these two individuals will receive almost identical pay at this point. It’s later on in life when the gap starts to appear, and this can be attributed to additional responsibilities that are stereotypically the mother’s, such as child rearing or care giving to elderly parents. Once people begin to work from home or go part-time, employers assume they won’t want to travel, can’t handle the better assignments, or are just unable to focus as much on work. This then leads to the worse assignments, which makes it difficult for employees to get raises and promotions. This phenomenon is what writer Anne-Marie Slaughter calls the “care penalty,” and ignoring this and attributing the gender wage gap to discrimination alone promotes an undevelopable public and leads us further from becoming the Great Community.
It was not long ago that women in the workplace were not tolerated. Rapid changes in our world have created opportunities for women to prosper across disciplines, but we are far from claiming that men and women are treated equally within these disciplines. In order to take steps towards creating the Great Community, we must educate ourselves and change our behaviors, institutions, and organizations to reflect the movement of events in our society. If we are able to do so, care givers will not be penalized for having children or caring for parents instead of focusing their time and energy solely on their careers. A mother caring for a child or a man caring for a parent does not indicate that these people are less invested in their careers. Additionally, it is possible for these people to take flexible schedules in order to provide the necessary care without actually working any less. Often times, employers prefer a set number of monitored hours and assume that any employees working from home would likely be working less, or producing lesser quality work, when in reality, this is rarely the case.
A society will not be healthy if open, intelligent communication is not encouraged between members. While public discussion is not necessarily always beneficial in creating solutions, open communication is necessary for people to express issues of public concern. It is my belief that the gender wage gap is an issue of public concern, since treating a person unequally compromises their freedom, and society’s proper goal should be to find freedom for all individuals.