Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Leconomist at Harvard University Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for Economics a few days ago for studying the causes of the gender pay gap. With his work he demonstrated that, a few years after graduation, the gap is minimal but grows approximately ten years after leaving university. Coinciding with the period in which she begins to start a family.
In an interview last year with the newspaper Financial TimesGoldin explains what it is the main problem: women continue to be the partner who spends the most on the “internal front” of the family. This commitment becomes a limit for the growth of remuneration since it increases more than proportionally based on the availability to exceed working hours, for example on weekends, on holidays, or at any time the service is requested.
Goldin says the job exerts a form of corruption on employees, offering a disproportionately higher pay to those who don’t set time limits. How do you get out of it? Changing the organization of work, for example by creating a fungibility of roles, such that no one is irreplaceable. Or, taking advantage of what happened naturally during the pandemic, when we realized that we could work from home.
Therefore even professions that normally required travel, such as law or finance, have become more available, through the platforms, to those who previously, having to guard the house, could not carry them out. Now however, says Goldin, the leap has been made and there is no turning back.
But most of all It must not happen that this advantage, which could be exploited by both spouses, automatically becomes a female-only choice, creating another ghetto for women. Among the solutions that Goldin suggests to companies, there is that of pushing both parents to take parental leave: perhaps women in the months before giving birth, men in the following ones.
Or, we add, the legislator could make male parental leave mandatory. Just enough time to create the mindset adequate to make it an acquired practice in society.
Do you want to share emotions, memories, reflections with us? Write to us at [email protected]
All articles by Antonella Baccaro
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED