Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

January 6, 2011

Recent male & female grads expect to combine career, family

havingThese days, both male and female college graduates expect to have a career and a family, according to a Harvard economist who spoke here last month.

“Ask college students today what their life goals are and you’ll find that the men talk more about careers and the women talk more about family. But ask again a few years after graduation and you’ll find that their aspirations have converged,” said Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard and award-winning author. “Both will speak of the twin goals of career and family. Today’s college graduates, despite their divergent choices of fields and income levels, are equally concerned about ‘having it all,’ that is, having both career and family — almost like it is one [concept].”

That decidedly was not always the case for women, who had to battle stereotyping and discrimination in varying degrees over the history of the United States, said Goldin, who delivered the 2010 McKay Lecture, sponsored by Pitt’s Department of Economics. She spoke on “The Career and Family Conundrum,” focusing on the changing expectations women have had for themselves dating back to the beginning of the 20th century and honing in on how workplace flexibility has influenced their career and family decisions.

“The goal of career and family for women is a relatively new one historically. There was a time when the choice of a career for married women had a negative connotation. Saying someone was a career woman meant she didn’t care about her kids, she was selfish, she cared only about herself,” Goldin said.

“The career and family outcomes of college-educated women suggest that the 20th century contained five distinct cohorts,” she maintained, citing data from a number of sources, including the U.S. Census, current population surveys, U.S. Women’s Bureau surveys, alumni records and, for the most recent cohorts, the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) of Young Women (1968) and the NLS of Youth (1979).

Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin

The first cohort, graduating college roughly between 1900 and 1920, had either family or career, she said. This was not the first cohort of women who graduated from college in America, but was close to it, Goldin said. “These women either had a family or a career, rarely both. Only 50 percent of these women had a child by the time she was 40 years old.”

The second cohort, graduating between 1920 and 1945, had a job first then family. Cohort 2 “married at a higher rate and had far more children than did the previous cohort, but they still had a low participation rate of careers when married,” Goldin said. “They often had a job for a short while before they married, and then they had families.”

The third cohort, the college graduate mothers of the baby boomers, graduated between 1946 and the mid-1960s and had family first; then, after the kids had grown, jobs.

“So, cohort 2 was a transition from the cohort that rarely had family, to cohort 3, a group that had children in great abundance. Cohort 3 married early; they had jobs only after their children had grown,” Goldin explained.

Among the fourth cohort, those graduating from college between the late 1960s and 1980 and whose stated goal was career then family, 13-18 percent achieved both by age 40, she said.

“Only with cohort 4 did large numbers of college women enter occupations that were thought previously to have substantial educational requirements and the potential to have major internal [financial] advancements,” Goldin said. “That cohort put career first, then family. While they achieved a lot in terms of career, they had very low rates of child-bearing, much less than had existed in cohort 3,” she added.

“A subsequent cohort, cohort 5, the most recent one that can be tracked into their 40s, had more children than the women in cohort 4 and also have achieved more in their careers than cohort 4. Their goal has been not family then career or career then family, one or the other, but both together, almost like one word,” Goldin said.

The transitions among the five cohorts occurred primarily because restraints were loosened on women’s ability to work in fulfilling careers, first after marriage and later after childbearing. Those changes also were rooted in the colleges themselves, with the increase in job market-related college majors for women beginning in the 1970s and the subsequent huge increase in the enrollment of women in professional schools, Goldin noted.

But many of the changes occurred in the personal lives of college women. For example, cohort 2 was able to be married and have a job, as least for a short while. Cohort 4 could marry at a later age and delay childbirth in part because of better contraceptive methods that enabled them to control their fertility and thus plan for career then family, she said.

Goldin discussed why career and family outcomes for college-educated women changed over time, focusing on four major professional fields: business (those women who went on to earn MBAs); law (women JDs); medicine (women MDs), and academia (women PhDs).

“We all know that the increase of women in various professions since 1970 has been quite spectacular,” Goldin said. “We know that women are now 77 percent of all newly minted veterinarians. That’s an incredible increase; females were a trivial fraction of veterinarians just 30-40 years ago.”

In addition, two-thirds of all new pharmacists are women; 50 percent of new optometrists are female, even though optometrists were once overwhelmingly male, she said.

“But the question becomes: Why do highly educated women enter certain professional fields more than others?”

A related question, Goldin said, is: Why do women choose different subfields, such as certain medical and business specialties, in a greater proportion than their male counterparts?

Citing data from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Goldin noted that women now earn 25 percent of the MBAs from the school.

“But, within that group, 8 percent work in venture capital and 15 percent in investment banking, but 71 percent go into human resources,” she said.

“The fraction of females among young MDs — those under 45 — in specialties such as ob-gyn, pediatrics, pathology, psychiatry, psychology, immunology and others is far higher [than in other specialties]. The fraction of females is far lower in surgical specialties and cardiology. The fraction of females is growing in certain traditional male fields, for example, gastroenterology and colorectal specialties,” Goldin said.

Consider as well, she said, survey data from the American Academy of Pediatrics showing that 36 percent of all female pediatricians — not just younger ones, not just the ones with children — worked part time, that is, under 35 hours a week, in 2006, compared to 28 percent who worked part time in 2000.

“That’s a big growth in six years. In addition, male pediatricians over the same timeframe increased the fraction who worked part time from 4 percent to 8 percent,” she said. “That tells you something about pediatrics as a career choice.”

What accounts for these shifts?

“In some cases, these career decisions are guided by preferences that have little to do with workload and hours,” Goldin said. “For example, women are labor economists far more than they are macro-economists, and they are even less so econometricians although the work conditions in these fields are identical.”

But more often, “decisions are largely governed by a desire for career and family and involve a trade-off between earnings and aspects of the job, such as work flexibility, including the ability to work part time at the worker’s discretion; to work from home, to work flexible hours,” Goldin said.

“That ability varies by profession. Some people will take lower wages in favor of having workplace amenities; some will sacrifice such amenities for higher wages and longer hours,” she said.

“The point is that [a profession] can provide workplace flexibility but charge a very high cost for it. So, it’s really not the existence of workplace flexibility as such, it’s how much you’re willing to pay for it. That’s the challenge for women: how to go out and measure these costs.”

Goldin also discussed her study of more recent vintage that focused on a dataset, dubbed Harvard and Beyond, describing women in three clusters of Harvard/Radcliffe graduating classes, termed cohort 1970, cohort 1980 and cohort 1990.

“We looked at them at 15 years after graduation, because we wanted to know what they did, not who they were,” Goldin pointed out.

“The women in these classes were truly extraordinary individuals, but their marriage rates echo broader trends among all women, suggesting that the timeframe and demographic change are stronger than any other factors.”

The median age at first marriage for college-educated women had been stable at about 22.5 years from the 1950s to the early 1970s. That median age increased by 2.5 years between 1970 and 1979. Partly that was due to women college graduates increasing their postgraduate education in professional schools, with the fraction of females among first-year law and medical students, for example, increasing from 10 percent in 1970 to 40 percent by 1990, Goldin said.

In addition, she said, the fraction of women not having a first birth by age 40 increased from 20 percent for those graduating in the early 1960s to 28 percent of those graduating in the 1970s.

The degree to which college-educated women take time off during their careers — for reasons ranging from job changes to personal health issues, and especially to care for children — accounts for some of the gender pay gap, Goldin maintained.

Her study found a great similarity across all three Harvard and Beyond cohorts in the number of months women had nonemployment spells by 15 years after college graduation. “Even among those with at least one child, slightly more than 50 percent at 15 years after graduation of all three cohorts never had more than a six-month nonemployment spell,” Goldin said. However, the mean time of all nonemployment spells for those women with one child was about one year for the 1970 and 1980 cohorts and nine months for the 1990 cohort, she said.

Certain occupations appear to better equip women to combine a career and family as measured in time off during the career cycle and because the earnings penalty from taking time off differs greatly by occupation, Goldin noted.

“At 15 years after earning their BA, the women’s labor-force participation rates are high for all areas, although just 60 percent worked full time, full year at 15 years out, and 30 percent had children and worked full time, full year,” she said.

Moreover, pay is influenced by which advanced degrees the women earned.

“Women MBAs had the lowest labor-force participation rate; the lowest share of those working full time, full year, and they take the largest amount of time off. At 15 years out, among those MBAs who had kids, 23 percent did not work at all, that is, were not in the labor force that year — compared to 3 percent of MDs, 14 percent of JDs and 10 percent of the PhDs.”

In 2005, the average sum of all out-of-work spells for Harvard and Beyond women 15 years after graduation was 1.55 years; for those women with children it was 2.08 years, and for women without children it was five months.

(For Harvard men graduates, the time off averaged a total of three months during the 15 years.)

Children were the most important factor related to women’s nonemployment spells. On average, one child increased time not at work by about 4 months; two children by 1.4 years, and three or more children by 2.84 years.

However, the opposite held true for men. The first child actually decreased total out-of-work spells by about a month; a second child by about 1.5 months, and more children by about two months, she pointed out.

Thus, Goldin concluded, the negative impact of children on women’s earnings mostly is accounted for by reduced hours worked, although she cautioned that the gender pay gap by no means has been eliminated.

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 43 Issue 9

Leave a Reply