Woman typically earn less than men for the same job. In fact, in the US, women earn 0.82$ for
every dollar earned by men. That’s a pretty massive gender pay gap. And it’s not just that, women
end up with less representation on corporate boards and women led startups attract less attention
and money from venture capitalists. But how did we end up with this massive divide and why does
it continue to happen? Well, that’s what Claudia Goldin’s been trying to answer. And let’s start
with what’s probably her most famous contribution the U-shaped curve.

The U-shaped curve You see, for a long time everyone believed that economic growth and women’s participation in the
workforce went hand in hand. Faster growth meant more women in the workplace kind of like a
straight-line growth. But in 1990, Golden showed that this relationship in the US has actually been
U-shaped. To show that, she dug out data spanning over 200 years in the US and she found that a
lot of historical data sets were flawed. You see, researchers had often ignored married women in
their data sets. One of the examples is married women partaking in agricultural activities as shown
above in the U-shaped curve in effect, they should be part of the labor force too. But that was not
happening. They were being overlooked. And if those women were included in the labor force,
their participation would have been three times higher than what records had previously
indicated. But then industrialization came along, and the labor force participation rates of women
actually plummeted. The simple reason is because women lost flexibility. They would have to go
into factories and that meant combing work and family would have been tough. So, while non
married women did join industries, married women dropped out. It was only in the 90’s when the
economy started reorienting towards services and women could access education more easily, that
things began to change. But still, progress was slow and that was a bit unusual. You would have
accelerated labor force participation to accelerate along with economic progress, but Golden
pointed out that there were probably 2 reasons to explain this. Firstly, there was marriage,
because there were actual rules that prevented woman from working in certain roles after