The shocking ramifications of Claudia Goldin's Nobel Prize in economics

Claudia Goldin spent her career studying what caused women to enter and exit the workforce. She can explain the wide ranging variables that affect women's labor from why the earnings gap stopped closing, to why veterinarians share jobs.

I've been writing a workplace blog for 20 years, and it's been sort of a like a Claudia Goldin book club. Each week we read blog posts that are in some way about her research. Sometimes we talk about policy. Sometimes we make it all about us. Lately we'd read a bit of her book , or read a nod to her research at Jezebel. But Claudia's been with us the entire time.

When I first started reading her, I wrote about?The End of the Glass Ceiling . In 2005. People thought I was nuts, but I was hooked. I trusted Claudia's research. The same year I cited her when I wrote?you can't get respect for work? and ?for parenting , right after I had a baby. And it was Claudia's research, in 2006, that made me realize most high-earning women quit after maternity leave and we should just own it .

Claudia would never tell people what to do. She's not like that. But I am.

So I wrote in 2013,?Don't be the breadwinner . Because Claudia showed that if you have a stay-at-home husband you're likely to get a divorce. In 2016 Claudia found that even paying professional women more than men could not get them to keep working once they became moms. So I ranted about don't pay for an?MBA ?or?law school or medical school ?because you won't even stay in the workforce long enough to pay back loans.

People always ask me, "How do you know that my job is not fulfilling if you don't know what I do?"

And I say, "Because you told me that your husband works full time and makes a lot of money and you're the primary caretaker of the kids."

That's Claudia Goldin right there. She won a Nobel Prize for showing us that it's impossible to have two parents doing "greedy jobs" — which is her term for jobs that are serious enough to garner respect. Because if both people have greedy jobs then no one is parenting.

The other thing people say to me is, "I have a friend who has a great career and she's a great parent."

And I say, "No you don't. She's lying to you."

I started calling out the liars . Claudia's data gives me confidence to go one step further and say to women no, you are not an exception, stop posturing to other women. Stop pretending to be superhuman to make other women feel bad.

Let's pause right there and let it sink in. Someone just won a Nobel Prize in economics for saying that you can either be a high performer in your career or a good parent but you can't be both. This is revolutionary. It’s important because we have known since the 1960s that parents who do not need a second income negatively impact the kids by going to work anyway.

So why does the second parent work if we have fifty years of research saying the second parent should stay home? Emily Oster, an economist who writes about parenting, cites this study in her book, Crib Sheet. In the book she writes that she knows the research and she doesn't care, because parenting is not as interesting to her as work.

It takes a special person to go to work when everyone knows the family does not need the extra income. Goldin shows that the majority of women, even the very educated of those women, choose to drop out of the workforce because they know they can't be a good mother and also be good at their job. Whatever good might mean to them, they know they can't be good at both.

I say this as a parent who did everything wrong. I wanted to have a really interesting career and I wanted to be very involved with the kids. And there was no room for my marriage . I wanted to get everything. Be everything. And be respected for everything. And that's probably why I've been entranced by Claudia Goldin for 20 years.

I see Claudia's research as a celebration of humanity. She traces women's rights from the 60s and 70s where almost 50% equity was achieved, through the 80s where women fought for a lot more. So by the time Generation X (my generation) got to the workforce we felt mostly equal.

Her research resonates with us because my generation didn't want to fight. We wanted to raise our kids. All her data now validates us, because we lived counter to what the baby boomers were doing yet had no voice of our own. She discovered that the more power women have the less women want to work.

Now, she's showing us why Gen Z women are skipping the workforce and marrying early. The surprising thing about power is that when women have it, they chose to have a partnership with a very clear division of labor. The next question is: what causes some women outliers?