Before I became an economist studying gender, I was a junior consultant. I spent late hours working far from home, skipping meals and making it back to our hotels late into the night only to be woken by urgent emails a few hours later. After a year of exhaustion and regular illness, I got assigned to a new team and started introducing myself differently: My name is Corinne, and I eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night.
I’ve been thinking of those early consulting days as progress closing the gender wage gap has essentially stalled out and mothers are leaving the labor force in droves. The data tells me that women, and especially mothers, don’t necessarily need remote work. We don’t need so-called flexible work schedules. What we need are plain old boundaries — jobs where work stops at a set time and allows other parts of life to exist without interruption.
A 2017 paper by two economists, Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais, showed that working mothers with children under 4 would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule, and would give up an average of just 15 percent of their pay to work from home. But they would forgo almost 40 percent of their income to avoid an “employer discretion” job in which their boss sets their hours at will. The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn’t unique to them: All workers in the study — men, women, parents and nonparents alike — disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them.
Yet these jobs are a significant part of our economy. At the high end of the income range, a shift toward interactive, team-based work has created something economists call convex returns to hours. Companies earn more when one worker works 80 hours a week than when two work 40 hours each because that one worker’s knowledge and relationships are crucial. Two relatively junior employees might be interchangeable, but two law partners or consulting managers are not — creating incentives for firms to eek out more hours from each employee.
It’s a pattern the economist Claudia Goldin calls “greedy work.” In lower-income jobs, it manifests as on-demand scheduling which allows companies to set workers’ hours at will, sending them home from scheduled shifts, calling them in abruptly or shifting schedules at short notice.
These demands are especially costly to women, who still carry the majority of home and child care responsibilities despite their entry into the labor market. In my research, I’ve seen that men spend about the same amount of time cooking and cleaning as they did in the 1970s. That doesn’t change even if their female partner is the primary breadwinner — she’ll still do about twice as much housework.
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