A chara, – Fair play to the people of Iceland and David McWilliams for shining a light on the gender pay gap (“Icelandic women went on strike this week. Irish women should follow suit”, Weekend, October 28th). It is timely given Claudia Goldin being the first solo woman to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this year for her research on women in the labour market.
As McWilliams points out, the inequality persists regardless of legislation designed to counter it. Goldin dug deeper to understand the root cause of the pay gap. In 2016 she spoke on the Freakonomics podcast
about women’s tendency to take on the burden of family caring of the previous and next generation.
Her crucial finding was that women tended to seek work that allowed for this and that offered what she calls “amenities”.
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“And a lot of what we see – not all of it – but a lot of what we see is this choice to go into occupations that have less expensive temporal flexibility, that allow individuals to do their work on their own time.” There’s a whole mess of socialisation going into those choices that another Nobel prize hopeful can unpick.
More recent events have shown us all the potential benefits of temporal flexibility.
According to Goldin, another “amenity” that impacts women’s entry into and continuing employment in certain sectors, is the ability to be substituted, to seamlessly share work with another.
Temporal flexibility and substitution are achievable by any organisation. Like many initiatives aimed at addressing inequality, the pay off is that it will benefit all people in society, regardless of gender. – Is mise,
ROSEANNE SMITH,
Dublin 12.