Thoughts on Goldin's _Career and Family_

There's a lot of history and data that wasn't exactly familiar but wasn't necessarily surprising either, so it didn't really jump out at me as something that changes my view of things. But the discussion of pharmacy careers was interesting. In short, Goldin spent much of the book making the important but commonplace point that family responsibilities pose a major challenge in women's careers. Even when women are well-represented and make the same pay as men in the same positions and working the same hours, women often make less than men on aggregate because many women are in different roles and/or work fewer hours. Also, because of the nature of certain jobs, there are increasing rather than decreasing returns on hours, as certain time-intensive roles cover more complex tasks for which the supply/demand equation produces greater pay.

Pharmacists used to mostly own their small businesses, and small business owners face greater time demands and financial risks, but also make more money as a result. (Or at least they make more money when the financial risks work out.) Even when they didn't own their own business, because they were working in smaller operations they often had to put in more hours to cover evenings and emergencies and whatnot. But with the corporate takeover of pharmacies, work is less differentiated. It's more shift work, fewer risky roles, and so women and men have the same jobs open to them, and pay gaps have shrunk. Yes, there are still higher-paying evening shifts and whatnot that men disproportionately take, but those are predictable (mostly). People are more interchangeable and can fill in for each other rather than being on call because they're unique and needed. With work less differentiated and more predictable, pay gaps have shrunk.

She sees this as progress, and in many ways it is. There's no denying the benefits of working for a large organization, nor the consumer benefits of being able to interact with a big chain that can transfer your prescription to another outlet if you're traveling. There's no denying the benefits to everyone when certain tasks become routinized. At the same time, well, even leaving aside the cliche things that could be said about "giant soulless corporations", there's an inevitable upward transfer of power from people who understand the task at ground-level to a corporate bureaucrat who often doesn't. Yes, ideally the person at corporate HQ setting policy for the person in the local office is someone who used to be in a local office and knows the on-the-ground reality. In practice, well, I work for a university with a metric shit-ton of administrators. I'm just saying.

Equality at ground level is a great thing, but the question we should be asking is if we can achieve it without transferring all control upward. Of course, keeping control at ground level means keeping risk and responsibility at ground level, which produces hectic hours that challenge family life. I get why she's applauding one facet of this, but I think she's given short shrift to other facets.

On the other hand, seeing the very tangible way in which standardization can lead to equality between the sexes does illuminate why corporations have (at least in certain respects) embraced social liberalism.