Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin on women, the work force and the pandemic

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This rebroadcast originally aired on November 17, 2022.

There seemed to be a troubling economic trend in 2020. A mass exodus of women from the work force.

Economic historian Claudia Goldin says there was a divide in who was forced out of the work force.

“Certain people could work at home and certain people couldn't," Goldin says. "Some of the great divides in our society and in our economy became even larger.”

Today, On Point: Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin on women, the work force and the pandemic.

Claudia Goldin, economic historian and labor economist. Professor of Economics, Harvard University. Author of many books, including Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity. (@PikaGoldin)

Latrish Oseko, working parent in Newark, Delaware.

Rachel Cook, working parent in Tampa, Florida.

Beth Folsom, working parent in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Elise Gould, economist, Economic Policy Institute.

Nancy Weindruch, mom in Camp Hill, PA.

Part I 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Harvard professor Claudia Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics this week. She is only the third woman in history to receive the economics award. Goldin is an economic historian of women in the workforce. Her groundbreaking research is about how our understanding of the labor economy radically changes when factoring in the often overlooked impact of women.

She is widely respected by her fellow economists, which may be why she received numerous public congratulatory messages such as, "Finally, to no one's surprise, Claudia Goldin has won the Nobel Prize." The Nobel Prize committee itself said in a statement, "Understanding women's role in the labor market is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin's groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future."

Well, late last year, Professor Goldin came to the On Point studio to talk with us about what we — meaning policymakers and the media — got wrong about the pandemic's impact on women in the workforce. Today, we're going to listen back to that conversation.

Because you might remember, at the time, it seemed irrefutable that women had experienced a massive upheaval. It was being called the "shecession." From February to May of 2020, almost 12 million American women lost their jobs, compared to nine million men, according to Pew Research. It was a complete flip when compared to the Great Recession back in '08, when more than twice as many men lost their jobs than women.

So by the time October 2020 rolled around, we felt like we had to cover the "shecession." Enough time had passed after that first burst of headlines that we felt like there was really something of substance, something long term that we had to understand. So on October 22, 2020, here's a bit of what I said on the show:

[Tape] This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. Today we're talking about the "shecession." Usually I'm not a huge fan of catchphrases, but this one's pretty accurate. It's the ongoing disproportionate impact that the pandemic recession has had on working women and their families.

Let it be known that I really do hate listening back to the sound of my own voice because I sound so serious! (LAUGHS) But it really did feel serious at the time. Well, that same month, October 2020, we talked to Latrish Oseko. She'd been laid off. Then her landlord sold the Newark, Delaware house that she, her boyfriend, and then her four-year-old daughter were living in, so they had to move into a motel. And the motel sucked up almost every dollar she was getting from unemployment.

LATRISH OSEKO: I don't know when I'm going to go to work. I just had a very nice Zoom interview yesterday, but I just don't know. You just feel so alone in this world and it's still not over. Like with this virus, it's just wreaking havoc and the management of it. And this unemployment nonsense. Ugh, it's just a mess. I'm just praying we continue to get through it.

CHAKRABARTI: What Latrish was living in October 2020 was real. But sometimes, in trying to analyze big historical moments, we can get the big picture wrong. Or at least we don't see it in enough detail. And that's what Claudia Goldin says has happened with all those heart rending headlines about the "shecession." Goldin is a professor of economic history at Harvard and she joins us here in the On Point studio. Professor Goldin, welcome.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, I'm very, very pleased to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, so are you saying — did we get this wrong? Was there not a "shecession" at all?

GOLDIN: Well, we got it right and we got it wrong. And it's also the case that there was a lot of pain and a lot of problems. And I don't want in any way to say that there weren't those. So it was a "shecession" in the sense that most recessions impact men more than women because they affect the cyclically sensitive industries. This one had two things that were big and different.

One was that it affected in-person services more and women are employed more in in-person services disproportionately. And the other one is that it affected care: care of children, care of the elderly, care of the little ones. But by and large, the differences were still mainly by level of education rather than gender.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So that's the thing that you've — your recent analysis finds: that it was education level, not necessarily gender, that were the biggest drivers of job loss. Okay. So on that point, we, you know, we went back and kind of re-analyzed our own coverage, and in doing that, we reached out to several people that we featured back in October of 2020, just to see how they're doing now, first and foremost.

So one of them is Latrish Oseko, who we just heard from, who, when we talked to her was wondering if she was going to be able to have a roof over her head in the near future. Now, remember at that time she really wanted to work. She needed to work to pay for daycare and a new place to live. So we called Latrish this week to find out how she's doing now and if she had, as she hoped, returned to work.

OSEKO: Thank God. Finally. So I work from home. I'm able to get my daughter on the bus. She's in first grade now. And then I'm able to get her off the bus with one of my breaks at work.

I had to turn down a few opportunities because, you know, the company was saying it couldn't be on wifi, it couldn't be using a hotspot because the signal wouldn't be strong enough. You have to have your own service. But you can't have your own service in a motel room. So it was very humbling when I was finally able to get our apartment and I realized that, "I can do this. I can get through this. I can have a job. I can work from home."

The first job I got, I worked for about eight months and I was temporary. It was a temporary position. So when I found this job, I was really happy. I just started June 27. It's my birthday. It was the best birthday gift ever. (LAUGHS)

The company's out of Florida. It's a kidney health management program. So I kind of feel good about it in that it's a step in the healthcare industry. So I feel like that is something that's going to give me a chance to be around if we should have another pandemic. So I may still be able to keep working.

My job right now, I think, is the most understanding, the most flexible job I've had since I've been working at the age of 14. I started this job working 8 to 4:30, and one of the things I made it important from the interview up until through when I started, that I have to be available to get my daughter. I will work weekends if you want, I will work up till 8 o'clock at night if I have to, but I need to just get my daughter. Because it saves us, you know, almost a thousand a month from child care and before and after care. You know, that's always been our highest bill under rent.

I joined a group called Moms of Delaware, which I didn't know at this time, you know, when I talked to you before. And I didn't even know any of these groups existed. We talk about things like this and I see that daycares are still shutting down one after another after another and I'm like, "Wow, where are we to send our kids?" Like, infants and toddlers are having to wait six months — on a six month waiting list?

Those are the issues I think that politicians are really missing. We want to work just like everyone else. But, unfortunately, everything falls on the mother. And, you know, we have to be here at home to take care of the children and you have to be available and employers aren't going to be, you know, flexible.

When you wake up every day in the morning and you look outside, you see the sunlight and all that kind of stuff and you're like, "Wow. Just a couple years ago, we were homeless. We had nothing. All our stuff was in storage." And we're still building. Like, I won't say everything's roses and flowers every single day. We're still building.

And it's kind of hard with inflation and groceries and everything almost doubling in cost and stuff. But you can deal with those things. But when you don't have the internet, when you don't have a place to stay, when you don't know where you're gonna lay your head, those are the things that get in the way of life.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Latrish Oseko, a working mom in Newark, Delaware, still building, as she said, even as life continues to throw challenges at her and us all.

Professor Goldin, we're going to spend the bulk of this hour really digging into your recent analysis about what the true dynamics in that so-called "shecession" were. But in the last couple minutes before we have to head towards our first break, I'm just wondering what you heard in Latrish's story there and how she's doing now.

GOLDIN: I heard a beautiful story. And I also heard a story about changes in the workplace. Not just personal changes to Letitia [Latrish] — and I'm so, so happy that she got that birthday present, that was beautiful — but I'm also hearing her say, "This is the most flexible job I've ever had."

I hear her saying she is setting her own hours. She is saving money because she can set her hours. I heard her say, "Everything falls on the mother." But I also heard her say something about the fact that the workplace has changed. And I also heard her say that internet and a roof over your head, where you can control your space, is now even more important. And it became extremely important during the pandemic.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, we're talking with Claudia Goldin today. She's a professor of economic history — and a labor economist, as well — at Harvard. And she recently wrote a report called Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women. And it really goes deep into what the true dynamics were of that so-called "shecession." Now, I'm saying "so-called" because maybe it wasn't gender, Professor Goldin says, that was the primary driver of those massive job losses we saw in 2020.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're joined by Claudia Goldin. She's a professor of economic history and a labor economist at Harvard University. And she recently wrote a report called Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women. And what Claudia Goldin does in this report is really go deep into what was the driver of the so-called "shecession."

And, Claudia, it feels a little strange to say "so-called" now, but we're going to find out more about why you say gender is not the main force that led to those just awful job losses in 2020. But before we do that, I'm wondering what got you interested in going back to look at this? What were you doing in 2019, 2020 that inspired you to take a look here?

GOLDIN: So in March of 2020, I was finishing a book. And the book is about how women have progressed and advanced through history from a generation at the start of the 20th century who could have career or family to women today who want to have both.

And the book takes us through 120 years, it's called Career and Family. And during that period, many of the constraints on women were lifted. And many women today, of course, aspire to have a career and family. But the question is, why can't they? And the book addresses, why isn't there more equality between men and women? Why isn't there more equity within the home for couples?

And a large part of that is that jobs are greedy. Many jobs are greedy. And for couples with children, we need one member of the family to be on-call at home, even if that person has a high-power professional job and one member can be on-call in the office and make a lot more. Okay?

But in 2020, when the pandemic hit, I thought I was finished with the book, but I couldn't finish the book. A disaster had struck the world. But at the same time, it handed me an epilogue. The pandemic magnified all of the issues that I was writing about, yet it also created a possible answer that many jobs — and we just heard that from Letitia [Latrish] — had become more flexible. And that's what I wanted to explore. But in addition, I'm a historian and the pandemic recession was clearly different from any other that we had known.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

GOLDIN: The sectors of the economy were hit differently. And in addition, it had the closing of all of these different kinds of care facilities.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So, okay. So let's let's talk about — that's such an interesting reason, like, actually getting an economic historian's perspective here. But so let's talk about what then what you found. Because, again, I just — at the beginning of the show, I just read those top-line numbers about just the sheer number of women who lost their job in 2020 versus the number of men. I mean, that in and of itself — I don't know what, if this says anything good or bad about media — was enough to like, have people say, "There's a 'shecession' going on."

You say that ultimately, education level was a better predictor of who lost their job, or then how quickly they regained it, than gender. So take me through the data about how you came to that determination.

GOLDIN: Okay. So you come to these determinations by looking at current population data, okay? So let me just go back and say that it's often the case that we grab onto numbers that we hear that say something that we think we want to hear — or not that we want to hear, but that is going on.

So every time there was a number that said that women had lost more jobs than men, we grabbed onto that, and it was a headline. But if it was the --

CHAKRABARTI: Are you saying confirmation bias? (GASPS) (LAUGHS)

GOLDIN: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Go on. Go on, Claudia.

GOLDIN: But it was also the case that we were coming from a position in December of 2019, January of 2020, February of 2020, which had some of the highest female labor force participation rates for the past 20, 30 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

GOLDIN: And so we were coming from an economy that was very heated. That had very high rates in which many young women, many women with young children, many women with low levels of education had been very nicely pulled into the labor force were then in March of 2020 suddenly let go.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so pause there for a second. So what you're saying is that we were comparing those 2020 numbers to an unusually hot economy in the previous year or two, right?

GOLDIN: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: And I mean the highest labor force participation rate for women, you said in what, did I hear you right, 30 or 40 years? Okay.

GOLDIN: Yeah. 30 years.

CHAKRABARTI: 30 years. Okay. So we were comparing job losses. So of course, so when we see dramatic job losses, they're coming off a high.

GOLDIN: They're coming off a high. But even if I use that as the hypothetical and the comparison, even if I do that, it's still the case. Then when you put the numbers for the fraction of individuals who were no longer at work in March, April, May, June, et cetera, relative. It's still the case that when we compare men and women, it's really the difference between college graduates were protected and non college graduates were not. Independent of whether they were men or women.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so this is actually the key thing that I have to say is, once explained, it makes a lot of sense, but it's quite eye-opening because we didn't talk about this at all in 2020.

So I've got a little bit more detail about the numbers you just talked about. That for female college graduates, those at work in the fall of 2020, I believe, fell by 2.7 percentage points. For male college graduates, that number was — it fell by 2.6 percentage points. So very, very close, men and women. And then you have for female non college graduates, those at work fell by 5.7%.

GOLDIN: Percentage points.

CHAKRABARTI: Percentage points. Okay. Oh yeah, that's percentage points. And then for men, non college graduates, 5.5 percentage points. So that's just right there, an explanation on how education was the big gap.

GOLDIN: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So, but so tell me more what the significance is of this then.

GOLDIN: Well, where it's coming from, which is pretty clear, is the jobs that people had before the pandemic struck. And the less educated were more vulnerable. And one of the reasons they were more vulnerable, we can see in other data, is that in May of 2020, when we first got numbers on the fraction of individuals who were working at home, working remotely, the fraction of the college group that was doing that was over 60%. The fraction of the non college group that was doing that was more like 10 to 20%. A little bit higher for women than for men, who it's very, very hard to do a construction job in your own house, okay? (LAUGHS)

So that became a very big divide. I'll put it this way: College graduates were inoculated before we had a vaccine. They were inoculated because they could work remotely. They were inoculated because they had larger homes and apartments. They didn't have as many people breaking their little bubble.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Well, we talked to Elise Gould, who's a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute about, you know, what maybe the real divides were in terms of who was impacted by job losses during the pandemic. And here's what she said.

ELISE GOULD: I think the biggest impact was really occupational segregation. So where you worked, whether or not your job could be turned into work from home, whether or not you had to face people in the pandemic, whether or not you lost your job. And so because of occupational segregation by gender, by race, by age, by education, certain groups were disproportionately impacted and lost their job.

It impacted many different groups, not just by gender. You know, if you look by age, young people lost their jobs in huge numbers. I don't think as much was written about that. But you did see a return. And you have seen a return of women. You have seen a return of Black workers, of Hispanic workers back in the labor force as some of those jobs. Many of them, obviously not all of them, but many of them have come back now.

CHAKRABARTI: So Claudia, Elise Gould there is saying much along the lines of what you're saying. So tell me more though about the age factor, because you had also mentioned about the surge of young women coming into the workforce 2018-2019.

GOLDIN: Right. So, you know, she's absolutely right, and she's done the work on age. I have not done the work on the teen unemployment rate and what happened to teens. My work was mainly beginning with individuals who were 20 to 24 years old because I really wanted to get a handle on parents and mothers and also the daughters who were taking care, disproportionately, of their elderly parents. But she's got the numbers there.

But it wasn't simply that people lost their job. People were more vulnerable in the types of jobs that they had. So it wasn't simply that they were dismissed and furloughed, but they were asked to go into jobs that were unsafe. They were unsafe often for them. They were unsafe for their clients as well. I mean, I think about all of the amazing, wonderful people — and let me thank them right now — who delivered stuff — food, goods to everyone's homes, to the people's homes who could afford to pay them. We thank them. They were our essential workers. They were vulnerable. Healthcare workers, thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: So but I'm still trying to understand though, the education gap, let's just call it that. The difference in educational attainment and how that really strongly informed who lost their job makes a lot of sense to me now that I see the numbers.

But I'm still trying to then mesh that with, say, the headline that we played at the very top of the show that at some point in time in 2020, it seemed like 90% — I don't even actually know if that job, if that number is accurate anymore — but this huge amount of job losses were falling on women. I mean, how do those two — how do those two mesh together? I'm still not quite wrapping my head around this.

GOLDIN: Because when we add up all the numbers, it's not going to be 90%. That's why. So, it is still the case at the end of the day, in my numbers, that women versus men were disproportionately affected, but by a very small amount. So the headlines that we saw that said "one in three mothers will lose their job, will leave their job, one in four women," these were way out of line. Way, way out of line. The number was more like one in 60 or one in 25.

CHAKRABARTI: How did we, maybe --

GOLDIN:  How did we get it wrong?

CHAKRABARTI: How did we get it so wrong? Yeah.

GOLDIN:  I'll tell you how we got it wrong. We got it wrong because rather than reflecting the economic data, many of these statements came from the stresses, the frustrations, the physical pain, the tears, the primal screams of parents and caregivers who actually remained employed. The amazing journalists who went out, who went to people's homes, who interviewed them during the height of the pandemic — not like it's gone (LAUGHS) — during the height of the pandemic, they were often women who have children. They were writing their stories from their homes with their children running around. They were stressed. So we're hearing primal screams rather than the actual facts.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Well, I can't dispute you on that. (LAUGHS) I'm still trying to understand what the actual facts do tell us.

GOLDIN: Well, the actual facts, so if you, so everyone could look at this paper. It's on my website. The actual facts are that women versus men did have higher rates of non employment during the pandemic. They did have higher rates of not being at work. Blacks had higher than whites. Those who were in these sectors that were disproportionately affected were far more deeply affected, for sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, about those sectors. Because you had mentioned this before, and I just would love a little bit more detail. Those sectors, you said they're more service-oriented sectors, and do we saw just a larger — was it that we saw a larger number of those young mothers, for example, in 2018, 2019, coming into those jobs?

GOLDIN: That I can't tell you, but probably that's the case. But these are precisely the sectors that states and municipalities shut down for a while. That clients didn't want to go to. Who went out to dinner in May of 2020? So these are restaurants and bars, haircuts — you remember all the people, all of our friends whose hair looked like it needed to be, they looked like they were hippies. (LAUGHS)

All of the personal service sectors, even dentistry. Even some of the health care sectors had reduced density or were shut down for a while. So these were sectors — so they're not just low wage sectors. Some of them were higher wage sectors. But they were all in-person. That's what made this different. What made it different was that — and this is why it is correct that it was not the "hecession", it was the "shecession," because the "hecessions" are the cyclically sensitive construction and manufacturing.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

GOLDIN: So it was different.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, it was different, but it wasn't necessarily exclusively driven by gender is what you're saying.

GOLDIN: That is exactly right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

GOLDIN: Definitely not.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I just want to keep drilling down here. Because again, it's the fact that none of us in the media really looked at 2018 and 2019 and how those were anomalous, in a sense, in a good way because of the really high labor force participation.

GOLDIN: 2019 to 2020.

CHAKRABARTI: 2020, okay. Because in your paper, you write that amongst young, less educated women with young children, you write that it's to be expected that recent entrants to the workforce are, on average, less attached, but that the group is very large and somewhat less attached than in more ordinary times. So they were far more likely to leave the workforce after the onset of COVID lockdowns than a group of women who had been consistently "in the labor force" before 2019.

GOLDIN: Right. So this gets to what the hypothetical is that you're comparing it to. There were two issues involved. One is the one you're talking about. And I will say that even if I did the math doing it that way, I would still get pretty much what I have. But the other issue has to do with seasonality. That we were, in some sense, blaming the pandemic for summer vacations. But that's a detail.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Claudia, I want to just quickly play a couple of more bits of tape here from Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute, because I really am quite focused on this inaccurate comparison that we in the media made regarding those 2020 job losses and comparing it just to the year before in 2019.

And Elise said, "Yep, the media did make a mistake," because we ought to look to avoiding the highest and lowest benchmarks when making these kinds of analysis. But she's also optimistic that that high of workforce participation in 2019, Elise says she's optimistic that that can be reached again.

GOULD: So if you take any given month, you might be getting, you know, a blip or some sort of change in the data that doesn't actually reflect the longer trends. And sometimes I might want to average three months or six months or even a year to see what's happening. But there's no reason to think we can't get back to the levels we saw. I don't think it's too high of a bar to think we can get back to January 2020. We are getting much closer every month.

CHAKRABARTI: But Elise Gould says a lot of fundamental things are going to have to change in order to encourage more women to participate in the workforce over a long period of time.

GOULD: When I think about, "What is the possibility for women's labor force participation?" I think we have a lot of room for improvement. We learned things like paid sick days are important. Have we made a national policy to guarantee that? No. Could we? Absolutely. We've seen that child care problems have kept many women from being able to fully participate as they might want to, other caregiving needs for other family members. We could make those investments.

CHAKRABARTI: Claudia, your response to that? Because the things that Elise just pointed out, I feel that there hasn't actually been any kind of meaningful structural change at all from before 2020.

GOLDIN: Except in 1943. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) I am talking to an economic historian here, so tell me more.

GOLDIN: Yeah, well, in 1943, younger married women, particularly those with children, were a tiny fraction of the labor force. Women in general were a tiny fraction. We were at war. A large fraction of the men were drafted. They weren't in the civilian labor force. Firms had contracts. They had to fill them for the war effort. What were they going to do? So they had to tap into that part of the population that wasn't at war and wasn't in the labor force. Many of them had small children. So the government used funds that had been set aside for infrastructure, okay? Set aside for infrastructure.

And what they did was they redeployed them to help cities and towns fund what? Nurseries. Nurseries that were open from early morning to late evening to have after school programs for the older children. Isn't that amazing? We did something in 1943 that we need today, but haven't done.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow! Okay. I hear a future show in this, Claudia. Because this issue of the real lack nationally of affordable childcare in all the women that we checked back in with over the course of this week, whom we had spoken to in 2020, it came up. Over and over and over again.

So I want to give you another example. Nancy Weindruch was on our show, that October 2020 show, the original "shecession" program we did, and she had an 18 month old son at that time. She was pregnant with their second child. She and her husband lived in Arlington, Virginia, and she'd recently left her job — again, this is back in October of 2020 — because of the lack of childcare during the pandemic.

NANCY WEINDRUCH: It'll be really interesting to see once this pandemic passes and once things settle down and we feel like we do have the opportunities to have child care that's reliable and consistent for our son and soon to be baby number two, it'll be another hard decision as to whether or not I go back to work. As of today, I am 100% determined to go back to work.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was Nancy in October of 2020, 100% determined to go back to work. Well, we reconnected with her earlier this week. And the first thing we did is we played her that tape that you just heard of her about two years ago. And here's how she felt after hearing it.

WEINDRUCH: I feel relief that I have — that it's in the past. It feels like a different world we were living in then. At the same time, I don't know that that much has changed.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting to hear Nancy say that because, in fact, a lot has changed in her life. She and her family left Washington, D.C. They now live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where her husband has family. And also, it's way more affordable than Washington.

And the financial pressure — because of the affordability, the financial pressure for Nancy to return to work is gone. And she's got two small kids at home now. So, whereas two years ago, she was 100% determined to go back to work, now, being at home is exactly where she wants to stay.

WEINDRUCH: I have so many mom friends right now. And it's because when I go to the library up here, compared to in D.C., I'm not surrounded by nannies. I'm surrounded by other mothers, women who have chosen — most of them I've met are educated, have a college degree or more and have made the decision to stay at home.

And I think together this small cohort of women outside of the big cities like a D.C. who are, I think, bravely making the decision to leave the workforce and focus on family. I think that together we're — I'm hoping that we're fighting the stigma. It's a — it's a real thing in a city like Washington, D. C. I felt insecure about it.

CHAKRABARTI: Nancy told us that she does miss working, but she does not miss what she describes as "mom guilt" for not being able to be with her kids when they needed her.

WEINDRUCH: My leaving the workforce has allowed our family to have more balance. But then I'm like, "Okay, but then does that offset our striving to have an equal workplace with women?" You know what I mean? Like, I feel like, okay, so me leaving to get more balance on the home front is perpetuating the imbalance in the workforce.

CHAKRABARTI: So back to what Nancy said in 2020, that she was 100% determined to go back to work. She wanted to add one more thing. She says she still thinks about returning to work often. But, as we heard Latrish earlier say, Nancy wants it to be on her terms.

WEINDRUCH: Having the choice is, it is a complete luxury and there's not a day that goes by that I don't recognize that and feel immense gratitude to be able to have that choice. I didn't feel like I had the choice to leave the workplace back in 2020. But now I feel like I have the choice to go back when I'm ready and when child care becomes less of an issue.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Nancy Weindruch who's now living in Pennsylvania. Claudia, I actually really was glad to hear back from Nancy because she's very happy with the decisions they made — obviously, you heard that. But she says she has the choice now only because  they moved and childcare is, I mean, living is more affordable overall, so she didn't have to work. That doesn't actually seem like an overall positive change if we're thinking about women in the workforce more broadly, right?

GOLDIN: And Letitia [Latrish] has to work because she's a single mom.

CHAKRABARTI: That's right.

GOLDIN: And Nancy doesn't have to work because she has a husband who has a job that's sufficiently paid and I will call it potentially a greedy job so that they work things out. And they have couple inequity and therefore they give rise to what I would call gender inequality in the workplace.

So we have to do something else so that we get both couple equity and gender equality. Couple equity and gender equality are two sides of the same issue. When we jettison couple equity, when we throw it under the bus, we've thrown gender equality under the bus with it.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm.

GOLDIN: Where--

CHAKRABARTI: Keep going. Go ahead.

GOLDIN: No, that's — where I would like to go is the possibility that what Letitia [Latrish] found is a new world of work. This isn't going to solve the problem of gender inequality and couple inequity at all. And I am very happy that Nancy is pleased with the decision she's made. Her statement was filled with comments that I would love to discuss more, such as the notion of stigma that she felt not because she was out of the workplace, but because she was out of the workplace in a place where women weren't out of the workplace, where only the nannies were taking care of the kids.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

GOLDIN: And now she has a community and I'm very pleased for her. But what we really want is that if child care costs will lower, then all of these women could go into the workplace.

CHAKRABARTI: If they wanted.

GOLDIN: If they wanted. And it sounds like that's something that she wanted, not just for now, but for when her kids are 12 and 16.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

GOLDIN: But I think that what we should think about, though, is whether this pandemic has had these silver linings. It seems clear that there's more flexibility in the workplace. Letitia [Latrish] spoke to that. There's less commuting. There's more ability to work from home.

And if you don't have to — for the higher income individuals, the more educated ones  --  if you don't have to go to Tokyo to do that M&A, and if you don't have to go to Zurich to sign that contract, then more women, and more women with children, and more women with other care responsibilities can actually do those jobs. So my students who ask me, "How is it all going to work out?" Well, maybe in the future you will be able to take those jobs and be competitive with those guys who are going to Tokyo every other weekend.

CHAKRABARTI: But that's because the workplace norms are hopefully shifting in the right direction.

GOLDIN: Well, workplace technology.

CHAKRABARTI: Technology. And expectations. But I'm not hearing the — or we still also need a shift in household norms, let me put it that way. Because I mean, what's driving the need for women to be able to not have to travel to Tokyo, as you say, is because they still have that disproportionate responsibility for home life.

GOLDIN: Yeah, there are three problems. There's the problem of child care, there's the issue in the workplace of the greedy jobs, and there's the issue of the social norms. And that last one is probably the hardest to push, and it's not to say that it is independent of the others.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I want to get back to, again, some of the things that we need to think about directly coming out of your findings in your 2022 analysis of the so-called "shecession." That again, it wasn't so much gender, but gender and educational attainment and race as well. That really, in fact, those three things together, let's put it — or at least two of them — were really what was driving major job losses. So for the millions of Americans who don't have a college degree or people of color, the ones who did have that disproportionate impact, women of color. What's the takeaway from all of this? Because your analysis does not seem to dispute the fact that they did indeed experience a kind of "shecession," right?

GOLDIN: They experienced their personal recession for sure. But it's also the case that, as Elise said, labor force participation rates of all these groups have amazingly come back. I am amazed at the resilience of the American labor force.

CHAKRABARTI: And so, therefore, I mean, are there things that we can do in particular during — because, look, there's going to be some other kind of economic catastrophe, unfortunately, that we'll have to experience sometime. What could we do now that we know that — the data is showing that things like education and race are so much more powerful here in terms of determining outcomes. Are there policy interventions that we should put into place that reflect the particular need of those Americans?

GOLDIN: Yeah, and one of the things that we haven't talked about is what happened to the children. We have children who have lost a year or two. There are many different aspects of infrastructure here. We have to have better internet. I mean, Letitia [Latrish] spoke about the fact that she couldn't work in a motel room because she didn't have internet. We have to make certain that our schools are built better so that they had better ventilation. We have to reassure our teachers that they're going to be safe. And of course, paying them more would be nice as well. But there are light sides to the story. There are also dark sides. And the dark sides are the ones that we should act on quickly.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Claudia Goldin, labor economist and economic historian at Harvard, author of Career and Family: Women's Century Long Journey Toward Equity, and also author of this 2022 report called Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women. Claudia, thank you so much for coming in today.

GOLDIN: I've enjoyed it immensely, Meghna.