Work, for me, is one of the greatest joys in life. It’s exhausting, and there are certainly days I’d rather be out in the sun playing soccer, but I love my job.
That’s not the case for everyone. But the opportunity to work comes with a lot of benefits: social and professional networks, empowerment and financial independence … the list goes on. It should be an opportunity accessible to all.
The pandemic has boosted the concept of working from home which has helped lift the proportion of women in work.Credit: Istock
While I’m not a caregiver (yet), it’s still a role more likely to be held by women than men. Because of this, one of the winners from the move towards flexible work in the past few years has been women.
But as Claudia Goldin, the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics (and the first woman to win it solo) has pointed out, working from home is not a new phenomenon. In fact, women were doing it centuries before laptops, the internet and video calls shook up the way we work.
It’s not just a matter of women doing housework, because housework isn’t included when we measure the labour force: the number of people who work or are prepared to work.
Goldin, who was the first woman to be tenured in Harvard University’s economics department, has made many inroads into women’s labour market outcomes. One common misconception she has tackled is that as an economy develops, the share of women in the labour force grows with it. Instead, she showed women’s labour force participation rate tends to follow a U-shaped curve.
At first, when agriculture (especially poultry, dairy, rice, cotton or peanut farming) dominates the economy, and incomes are extremely low, there are a lot of women in the labour force. “They are sometimes paid labourers, but more often are unpaid workers on family farms and in household businesses,” Goldin says. At this point, we’re at the beginning of the U-curve.
Then as incomes rise, there is less immediate need for partnered women to work to support the family. This is called the “income effect”.
One group was working from home centuries ago. Here’s why it matters.
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22.04.2024
Work, for me, is one of the greatest joys in life. It’s exhausting, and there are certainly days I’d rather be out in the sun playing soccer, but I love my job.
That’s not the case for everyone. But the opportunity to work comes with a lot of benefits: social and professional networks, empowerment and financial independence … the list goes on. It should be an opportunity accessible to all.
The pandemic has boosted the concept of working from home which has helped lift the proportion of women in work.Credit:........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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