诺奖得主戈尔丁致力研究“女性成功的奥秘” | 纽约时报
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The New York Times
纽约时报
The New York Times
纽约时报
Claudia Goldin’s Nobel-Winning Research Shows ‘Why Women Won’
克劳迪娅·戈尔丁致力研究“女性成功的奥秘”，斩获诺贝尔经济学奖
The winner of the Nobel in economics has demonstrated how gender gaps in work have shrunk, and why some remain.
诺贝尔经济学奖获得者戈尔丁揭示了劳动中性别差距的缩小，以及为何差距仍存在的原因
Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday, has documented the journey of American women from, in her words, holding jobs to pursuing careers — working not just to support themselves, but because work is a fundamental aspect of their identity and satisfaction.
诺贝尔经济学奖于周一（2023年10月9日）揭晓，奖项授予了克劳迪娅·戈尔丁（Claudia Goldin）。用戈尔丁自己的话说，她的研究记录了美国女性从干工作到拼事业的历程。女性工作不仅仅是谋生，它更是女性获得身份认同和自我满足的核心要素。
She has described the changing roles of women in the last half-century as “among the grandest advances in society and the economy.” She has shown how they have outpaced men in education, poured into the labor force and found meaning in their work.
戈尔丁认为过去半个世纪中女性角色的转变是“社会与经济领域最伟大的进步之一”。戈尔丁展示了女性如何在教育上超越男性，大规模进入劳动力市场并找到工作的意义。
Yet, her research demonstrates, women still lag behind men in various ways — in their pay, their work force participation and the share who reach the top of professions.
但与此同时，她的研究也表明女性在许多方面仍落后于男性，如薪酬、劳动参与率、担任高阶职位的比例。
That’s no fault of their own, her recent work has shown. It’s because of the way work is structured. American jobs disproportionately reward long hours. The most glaring gender gaps would diminish, she has argued, if employees had more control over where and when their work got done.
但戈尔丁的近期研究表示，这些“落后”不是女性自己造成的，而是由于工作的结构性质。美国职场由于看中工作时长。她认为，如果员工能对工作地点与工作时间有更多控制权，那么最显著的性别差距会缩小。
Rewriting history
重写历史
Women’s work was not given full credit in historical sources, the Nobel committee noted, and she used historical data to describe it. Her research analyzes cohorts of women born around the same time to show shifting patterns, and the societal forces that affected them.
诺奖委员会的评价是历史资料并未充分认可女性的奉献，而戈尔丁则用历史数据摆展现了女性的种种付出。她研究在同时期出生的不同女性群体，分析其中的变化规律，以及影响她们的社会力量。
Women “gave birth to modern labor economics,” Professor Goldin, who teaches at Harvard, has written, because economists study variations in behavior. “Women provided an abundance of that,” she wrote. “Men, by and large, were not as interesting since their participation and hours varied far less.”
在哈佛任教的戈尔丁写道，没有女性“就没有现代劳动经济学”，因为经济学家研究的是行为变化。她写道：“女性为研究提供了大量的素材。而男性总体而言没什么研究价值，因为他们在工作参与度与工作时间上的变化要小很多。”
In public records in the 1800s, married women’s occupation was often listed as “wife.” She uncovered other sources of data to show that, in fact, they often worked in agriculture and other family businesses.
在19世纪的公共档案中，已婚女性的职业通常被记录为“妻子”。而在其他数据来源中，戈尔丁还发现女性实际上经常参与农业生产和其他家族生意。
Industrialization, however, made it less likely for married women to work (though unmarried women commonly worked in factories.) She posited that, unlike farming, manufacturing work was harder to do from home, foreshadowing the struggles balancing work and family life that mothers face today.
然而，工业化减少了已婚女性参加工作的机会（尽管未婚女性通常在
工厂工作）。戈尔丁认为，制造业工作很难在家中完成，也预示了当下作为母亲的女性在平衡工作与家庭上面临种种困难。
In the first half of the 20th century, societal changes made it possible for more women to work. These shifts included the rise in high school graduation rates, technological advances that made housework less demanding, and the growth of office jobs.
20世纪上半叶发生了许多社会变迁，包括高中普及率增加、技术进步而降低了家务的繁重度、办公室工作数量上升，这些变化让更多女性获得了工作机会。
The quiet revolution
无声的变革
A major change happened in 1970, the beginning of what Professor Goldin calls “the quiet revolution.” There was a sharp inflection point in the likelihood that women worked, in their attachment to their careers and in their ability to jointly make decisions with their spouses.
1970年发生了一个重大改变，戈尔丁教授将其称之为 “无声的变革”。妇女参加工作的可能性、她们对职业的依赖以及与配偶共同决策的能力都发生了巨大转折。
But there was one generation of women caught in the lurch — those who were young in the 1940s, whose expectations for their futures did not align with their opportunities. They saw their mothers being housewives or limited to jobs as teachers or nurses, and largely did not plan for careers of their own.
但是，有一代女性则身陷困境，那就是成长于 20 世纪 40 年代的女性，她们对未来的期望与她们面临的机遇并不匹配。她们看到自己的母亲要么成了家庭主妇，要么只能从事教师或护士的工作，并且大多没有自己的职业规划。
“They were in for a great surprise,” Professor Goldin wrote. As job opportunities opened, they often felt trapped, without the education or training to take advantage of them.
“她们进入社会后大受震惊，”戈尔丁教授写道。当工作机会来临时，因为没有受过教育或培训，她们往往感到束手束脚，无法抓住机会。
Beginning with those born in the late 1940s, girls became better prepared. “These young women began to perceive that their adult lives would differ substantially from those of their mothers’ generation,” she wrote.
从出生在20世纪40年代末的女孩们开始，女性对未来的准备更加充分。“这些年轻女性开始意识到她们的成年生活将与母亲那一代人大不相同，”她写道。
Teenage girls began expressing lofty career aspirations. Young women began pursuing professional degrees in large numbers. They delayed marriage and children. When they formed families, they kept working.
少女们开始表达崇高的职业抱负。大量年轻女性开始攻读专业学位。她们推迟结婚生子。成家后，她们还会继续工作。
In a working paper published the day she won the Nobel this week, titled “Why Women Won,” Professor Goldin noted that the period between 1963 and 1973 was crucial. It included the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the Roe v. Wade decision and the admission of women to many Ivy League schools.
戈尔丁教授在本周获得诺贝尔奖当天发表了一篇题为“女性为何获胜 ”的研究手稿，她在文章中指出，1963 年至 1973 年是一个关键期，在这一时期，《同工同酬法》（the Equal Pay Act）被通过了，“罗伊诉韦德”案（the Roe v. Wade）判决结果公之于众，以及许多常春藤盟校开始招收女性。
Women began marrying later, keeping their birth names and divorcing more often. The birth control pill, approved in 1960 and widely available for single women around 1970, allowed them to delay childbirth, and to obtain more education, Professor Goldin showed in a paper with Lawrence Katz, another Harvard labor economist (and her husband.)
女性结婚的时间越来越晚，（婚后）保留自己的姓氏，离婚也越来越频繁。戈尔丁教授与她的丈夫，哈佛大学的另一位劳动经济学家劳伦斯·卡茨（Lawrence Katz）在一篇论文中指出，避孕药于 1960 年获得批准，并于 1970 年左右在单身女性中普及，这使得她们可以推迟生育，并接受更多的教育。
Increasingly, women’s occupations began to “define one’s fundamental identity and societal worth,” she wrote.
她写道，女性从事的职业日渐成为展现“个人主要身份特征和社会价值的决定性指标。”
The remaining gender gaps
依然存在的性别差距
Today, she has shown, women are more likely than those in previous generations to work throughout their lives. Despite the fears early in the pandemic that school closures would force women to drop out of work and erase decades of gains, women have largely kept working. They are increasingly doing so past retirement age, often not out of financial necessity but because they have invested in their careers and are still enjoying them.
戈尔丁还指出，与以往几代人相比，如今女性更有可能终身工作。尽管疫情初期有人担心学校停课会迫使女性失业并使其数十年取得的成果付之东流，但大多数女性仍在继续工作。女性越来越倾向于在达到退休年龄后仍继续工作，她们这样做通常不是出于经济需要，而是因为她们在自己的职业生涯中投入了时间和精力，并依然乐在其中。
Professor Goldin, the first solo woman to win the Nobel in economics, is an example: She received her doctorate in 1972 and is still working at 77.
作为第一位独立获得诺贝尔经济学奖的女性——戈尔丁教授自己就是一个例证：她于1972年获得博士学位，如今77岁的她仍在工作。
Yet just as women who were children in the 1940s underestimated their career potential, the current cohort of working-age women may have overestimated it.
然而，正如成长在上世纪40年代的女性低估了自己的职业潜力一样，当今处于工作年龄的女性群体可能高估了自己的职业潜力。
Men’s and women’s careers and pay are basically the same when they start working, but they change when children arrive. Her research shows a small dip in the share of women working in their late 30s and early 40s. Mothers are less likely than before to quit after their first baby, but slightly more likely to temporarily do so later, after “they try as hard as they can” not to, she has said.
初入职场时，男性和女性的职业和薪酬基本相同，但在有了孩子后情况就发生变化。戈尔丁的研究显示，职场中40岁左右女性占比略有下降。她说，相较于以前，女性在生完第一个孩子后辞职的可能性较小，但在“尽可能努力”不辞职后，更可能暂时离开工作岗位。
She has explained a driving force behind the gender inequity that remains in the American work force: Employers have begun paying disproportionately more for long, inflexible hours. Anyone who scales back for a time, or who is unavailable on weekends or evenings, is at a disadvantage.
她解释了美国劳动力中性别不平等依旧存在的背后驱动因素：雇主过于放大能长时间在岗且在岗时间固定对薪资的影响。因此无论是暂时缩减工作时间的人，还是周末或晚上无法工作的人都处于不利地位。
As a result, it makes economic sense in highly educated couples for one parent, usually the father, to be on call at work, while the mother is on call at home. Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands, she has said. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.
因此，从经济角度来看，在受过高等教育的夫妇中，通常是父亲主外（工作），母亲主内（居家）更为合理。她说，女性并不是因为丈夫富有而退出工作，而是因为她们退出工作丈夫才富有。
She has disproved the conventional wisdom that women are paid less because they choose lower-paying careers, by showing that the pay gap is larger within occupations, and largest in the highest-earning ones, like medicine and law. If equally productive workers were paid the same on an hourly basis, the differences in pay would disappear.
她指出，同一职业内的薪酬差距更大，尤其是在医学和法律等收入最高的行业中薪酬差距最大，通过这一点她反驳了“女性工资较低是因为她们选择了低薪职业”这一传统观点。如果同等生产力的劳动者小时工资相同，薪酬差距将会消失。
Closing these remaining gender gaps would require flexibility in where and when work gets done, her research explains. She has said in the past that such a change would require a fundamental remaking of the American workplace, “taking the whole thing down.” But more recently, she has expressed hope that the pandemic may have made that reality more feasible for white-collar workers.
她的研究解释道，要消除这些尚存的性别差距，需要更灵活的工作地点和工作时间。她曾表示，这种改变需要对美国职场进行根本性重建，"全部推倒重来"。但她最近表示，希望疫情使白领们更容易将消除性别差距变为现实。
“I suppose I am ever optimistic that this will lead to some reasonably good things,” she said.
她说：“我想我一直很乐观地认为这将带来一些非常好的事情。”
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观点|评论|思考
女性地位一直是一个争议性的话题。。根据联合国统计数据，中国女性地位排第9，全球领先。现代女性无论从教育、工作等方面都有更多机会。西方国家结婚女性流行随夫姓，国内的孩子很多开始流行随妈妈姓。扫盲运动，大多数新生代女性能识字，我们也经常听见女学霸的故事，无论是小学、初中、高中、大学，越来越多女学霸把男同学虐得不行。
在工作方面，70%的女性有工作，中国女高管比例30%。特别是在大城市，工作优秀的女性多于男性，给女性的工作机会也挺多，经济上独立让女性有更多选择权，这也侧面解释了为什么在大城市大龄女青年，以及离婚率比例很高。这些数据说明中国现代女性相比传统女性，总体社会地位在提高。
数据好看，但是不是意味着女性地位就很高？我们从另外一些数据就能知道差异，世界经济论坛发布了《全球性别差异报告》，一国排名106位，属于靠后的位置。虽然有法律规定不能歧视女性工作者，隐性的歧视依然存在。和本文一样，女性在收入待遇，管理层岗位和男性存在较大差异，最近几年有加大的趋势。工作岗位男士优先，其实有时候也可以理解。对于一家小企业，生存是个问题，在同等条件下，男性相比女性没有上班时长和照顾小孩的束缚。所以虽然女性整体社会地位在提高，但是性别差异缩小的速度还没有跟上世界脚步。
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愿景
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