The Declining Significance of Gender?

3. The Rising (and then Declining)Significance of Gender

Chapter 3 The Rising (and then Declining) Significance of Gender Claudia Goldin W omen now constitute almost half of the United States labor force. About 80 percent of women twenty-five to forty-four years old work for pay and 85 to 90 percent of female college graduates do. Looking across the full twentieth century the gender gap in labor-force participation has nearly closed (figure 3.1), and the gap in earnings has narrowed considerably, especially in the last twenty years (figure 3.2). One might be tempted to conclude that there has been a continual declining significance of gender in the labor market for the past hundred years or possibly longer. But for some time before there was a declining significance of gender, there was a rising significance of gender in the paid labor market. Gender became a truly signi ficant factor in the labor market in the first few decades of the twentieth century.1 Ironically, gender differences emerged and were solidified at the very moment that women began to increase their labor-force participation after marriage and stream into white-collar work. The fraction of employed women in white-collar jobs climbed from 17.8 percent in 1900 to 44.2 percent in 1930 (see table 3.1).2 The notion that gender became significant in the labor market in the early twentieth century might well be greeted with skepticism. Gender, many will rightly claim, has always mattered in the labor market, and the sexual division of labor is ancient. Furthermore, labor-force participation rates and the ratio of female to male earnings rose during the mid-twentieth century. But I will try to convince you that gender distinctions in work, jobs, and promotion were extended and solidi- fied in the early twentieth century and became long-lived. These gender distinctions emanated from the treatment of individuals as members of a group, rather than as separate individuals.3 The logic of this essay hinges on what I mean by the significance of gender. Various forces served to narrow gender roles and to increase women’s economic status , such as their labor-force participation and their relative earnings. But—and / 67 this is the important part—had gender not become as significant these positive changes would have been even greater. Had women entered white-collar positions with a sense that they could advance, they would have invested more in their training and education. Gender gaps would have shrunk even more. Another way of making the point is that “wage discrimination,” by which is meant the fraction of the wage difference that cannot be explained by observables, increased from the early part of the twentieth century to 1940 (see Goldin 1990, chapter 4). The increase moreover was large—from at most 20 percent of the gap to 55 percent of the difference. The early twentieth century could have been a major turning point in gender distinctions in the labor market, education, training, and even the home. But it was not. Even though the early twentieth century could have been a watershed in the labor market, gender equality would not have miraculously emerged in the 1920s. However, the history of women in the labor market could have been sufficiently different to have hastened the advances of the past three decades by perhaps twenty years. I conclude this essay with some reflections on the period of the declining significance of gender (1970 to the present), but my main concern here is with its rising significance (1900 to 1940). The Declining Significance of Gender? 68 / FIGURE 3.1 / Labor-Force Participation Rates of Men and Women Twenty-Five to Forty-Four Years Old, 1890 to 2000 Sources: 1890 to 1960—Goldin (1990). 1960 to 2000—Current Population Surveys. 100 80 60 40 20 0 Participation Rate (Percentage) 2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940 1920 1930 1910 1900 1890 Males, Census Males, CPS Females, Census Females, CPS My argument, in brief, is the following. Real equality between men and women in the paid labor force requires that women be employed after marriage and childbearing . In the late nineteenth century, when most paid employment was in sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and transportation, brawn was an important attribute, and many occupations were “sexed” rather than “gendered .”4 Employment for the bulk of adult, married women could...