‘Greedy jobs’ have us trapped in the 1950s
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I have just dropped the ultimate career clanger by having a baby. If I follow the general trajectory for my age and gender, my pay will now stall over the coming years as I suck up the so-called motherhood penalty.
The largest wage gap between men and women is among employees aged 30 to 39, the Office for National Statistics found this month, meaning I’m right on cue to become an economic loser. Two fifths of working mums have rejected a promotion due to childcare pressures, charity the Fawcett Society found last week.
Not me, I convince myself, but perhaps I’ll be so distracted by the sleepless nights and nursery bugs that I won’t even notice it happening.
The rolling conversation on the wage gap is, as actresses Cate Blanchett and Kirsten Stewart have already put it, a bit boring. But it’s a stubborn economic problem that if left unchecked could leave households sleepwalking into roles from the 1950s.
Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, who won a Nobel Prize for economics last month, blames “greedy jobs” for the inequality and points out that both parents end up missing out.
These are high-paying, high-pressure professions which pay disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, proving so demanding that they often require one parent to quit. As Goldin told a recent International Monetary Fund podcast, such jobs require you to give all of your life.
Women tend to be less drawn to these all-consuming positions, she found, typically taking a step back to focus on more childcare responsibilities instead. The men who then tend to fill these jobs become economically powerful, though inevitably miss out on time with family. Achieving the perfect balance is a near-impossible task that might explain why so many people report feeling angry at work (almost one in five, according to a recent Gallup poll).
Under Goldin’s greedy jobs theory, power couples who were seen as career equals able to chase late nights and unpredictable hours before having kids are forced into tough decisions once childcare comes into it. Often one person goes for a non-greedy job, or works part-time, or packs it in all together due to extortionate childcare costs.
There’s no reason it has to be the mothers who step back, but evidence shows repeatedly that it is. Women in their 30s are 10 times more likely than men to be economically inactive due to looking after the home or family, according to the Trades Unions Congress, while a Netherlands-based study conducted last year found that working mothers feel more guilt than working dads.
It is at parenthood that the wage gap begins to emerge. Those opting to go part-time or do their job from home are likely to become less visible at work and miss out on crucial after-hours networking, while the parents able to throw themselves fully into time greedy jobs are likely to see big rewards (a wage bump often dubbed the “fatherhood bonus”).
This divide has become more stark in recent years. There were fears during the pandemic that lockdowns meant families were reverting to 1950s-style domestic roles, with so many women facing job losses during the crisis that some experts dubbed it a “she-cession”. While many women have since returned to the workforce, the 1950s analogy remains relevant.
Equal earnings are a long way off, and the gap is all the more noticeable when a greedy job is thrown into the mix. A recent study found that super-rich couples are most likely to opt for traditional male breadwinner-female homemaker roles. The finding, by the University of North Carolina and the University of California, chimes with Goldin’s theory that it is the higher paid jobs which often force parents into traditional roles.
As one parent’s career gets protected, the person on-call at home can find it near-impossible to get back to work. In a recent letter to The Telegraph, a mother keen to return to work said her caregiving role now felt set in stone. “My husband’s career has flown – he works long hours, and has partly been enabled to do this since he does absolutely nothing at home,” she wrote. Even as childcare responsibilities begin to lift, the greedy job remains stubbornly in the way.
Reducing childcare costs is an obvious solution, but the bosses offering these high-flying positions also need to think about how these jobs can become less all-consuming in order to attract the best workers. Those in power need to acknowledge that the motherhood penalty is alive and well.
