OG Tuesday Issue #173

Start your morning with this affirmation:

Today’s checklist: Read a Nobel laureate’s take on the gender pay gap, choose monotasking over multitasking, WOOP your life, and roll your eyes at an 80s throwback article on women at work.

Professor Claudia Goldin recently received the Nobel Prize in economics for “uncovering key drivers of gender differences in the labor market.” She recently did a podcast on family economics with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Quick takeaway: Bias and discrimination are only part of the gender pay gap problem. A more deep-seated problem is the inequitable distribution of caregiving responsibilities within families.

Here are some of our favorite “Goldin” nuggets of wisdom from the episode: 

A gender pay gap continues to exist because, in general, women pay for flexibility in their work.

Goldin explains that, while men are increasingly taking on larger portions of caregiving duties for their families, women still shoulder most of the burden. They actively choose flexible jobs that enable them to do so. Flexible jobs tend to pay less than certain higher-paying jobs Goldin calls “greedy jobs,” which require an employee to work long hours and be available 24/7.

Men in circumstances that carry little or no caregiving responsibilities gravitate to these higher-paying jobs, essentially allowing the pay gap to survive despite other progressive advances.

Anti-discrimination programs are only part of the solution for closing the pay gap. We also need to close the caregiving responsibilities gap.

Goldin notes a few potential strategies:

Visit the IMF website to listen to the full episode > 

Want more? Goldin also wrote an entire book on family economics.

You have so much to do. So much that the idea of doing just one thing at a time seems inefficient, reckless even. You start to get ahead on some work during your last meeting of the day. You try to read a research brief while you’re making dinner.

You’ve fallen into the multitasking trap. You’re exhausted from trying to do multiple things at once and frustrated because it feels like you’re actually getting less done overall.

Designer Paolo Cardini wants you to forget multitasking. Instead, he suggests monotasking, or simply doing one thing at once.

“When’s the last time you really enjoyed the voice of your friend?”

His rhetorical question conveys the simple benefits of radical focus and also points out that many of us are multitasking without even realizing it.

Consider what you might fill in for the voice of your friend.

Cardini urges people to reflect on what areas of their lives are worth the Herculean effort of monotasking and then committing to the practice.

Some goal-setting strategies sound good on paper. You hear inspirational examples of people who used the strategy to change their lives.

However, when you sit down to translate your desires according to the strategy’s tenets, you might feel lost and confused.

WOOP (wish, outcome, obstacle, and plan) is no exception.

Wish? What does that mean? What kind of wish?

Luckily, the WOOP my life website has an interactive form to walk you through the process of aligning your goals with the WOOP strategy.

Try it out on the org’s website >

Here are a few (kind of) hilarious quotes from a 1986 Atlantic article, Women in the Workforce, penned by George Gilder. (A writer once known as Time magazine’s ‘male chauvinist pig of the year.’)

This one suggesting that women are practically pushing men out of their hard-earned jobs: “Women seem to be crowding into sectors of the workforce traditionally occupied by men.”

This one where he quietly laments the patriarchy’s impending downfall: “Every year seems to bring new evidence of radical change in the masculine and feminine roles around which most Americans have oriented their lives and expectations.”

This one where he uses quotations to show how paradoxical he finds the idea of women in management: “From 1972 to 1985 women’s share of professional jobs increased from 44 to 49 percent and their share of ‘management’ jobs nearly doubled—growing from 20 to 36 percent.”

This one where he suggests women are actually the discriminators—not the discriminated against: “Let us at least consider the possibility that many women, deliberately rejecting the values of male careerists, are discriminating against the job “rat race” and in favor of their families.”

Note: While GIlder’s last point orbits some of those made by Claudia Goldin (see above), his framing is just so 80s.

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