CEOs Hate Remote Work, But This Nobel Prize Winner Says It's a Win for Women

"Poop is extremely important in history,” is not a sentence I thought I'd hear when interviewing Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor and the first woman to win a solo Nobel Prize in economics, for her groundbreaking research on women in the workforce.

Goldin is not making your average poop joke. Well, maybe a little bit, but it's meant to highlight that the history of modern technology begins with the invention of sewer systems, which reduced the spread of disease and allowed humans to gather safely in dense urban environments.

"Why else do we have cities other than the fact that people do better together than they do apart?" she says. Combined with clean water, sewer systems have a far bigger impact on human history than more modern inventions, according to Goldin: "They keep us alive."

The pandemic, however, forced us to reconsider typical ways of gathering, particularly as it applies to the workplace. Goldin says we should embrace new ways of working, whether hybrid or fully remote, as they open up new opportunities for women to join the workforce and for men to spend time with their children.

"Women have traditionally, and still have, more care responsibilities," Goldin says. "We have a ton of numbers about the time women spend with kids versus men. It's pretty clear that it's not the same."

While remote work isn't "the fairy dust that's going to catapult our world into the way it should be," Goldin says it's an overdue evolution that could rewire male-female relationships in ways that all everyone should welcome—but that's not guaranteed.

Emily Dreibelbis: What do you think about the trend toward remote work?
Claudia Goldin: I think it’s astounding. We went from about 5% [before the pandemic] to 30% of fully paid days, over six hours of work, that individuals would say that they worked remotely. And it’s about the same for men and women, which is somewhat of a surprise to me.

Why does it surprise you that women and men are working from home at the same rate?
Female labor force participation rates in the US have been remarkably low relative to other countries, and certainly our neighbor to the north. Ever since the 1990s they've been stagnant, and now they've suddenly increased and part of that, I think, is that an individual who [used to] work part time and receive relatively low pay without promotion possibilities, can now work full time together with other responsibilities that she has that men generally don't have. And so in that sense, it's taking flexible jobs and making them more productive.

Does the ability for work remotely have an impact on men as well?
I hope it does. I hope there are more men who read to their children at night rather than taking a plane to Zurich. Ask any guy you know who's 65 and has kids and he'll say, "Love those grandkids, just love those grandkids. I don't remember when Steven walked, or when Julia said her first words, but with those grandkids, I do. I'm being given a second chance." Well, let's give them the first chance.

Is it too much to say that the ability to work from home could rewire the relationship between men and women?
That's what we would hope, that we would see more men at the park with the carriage, and more men take advantage of the parental leave policies that their firms offer.

If there are so many benefits to remote or hybrid work, why did it take a pandemic for society to fully embrace it?
We didn’t have a coordinated equilibrium, which you need for technology to work properly. It took a pandemic to get us to coordinate on that.

What is a coordinated equilibrium?
Having a coordinated equilibrium means we all learn something and we can use it later. It's the essence of the technology issues you write about in PCMag. In March of 2020, when we were all told we had to teach on Zoom, everyone learned how to use it. But prior to that, I could’ve told a class of 30 that every now and then I was going to hold class on Zoom because I decided that I wanted to be in the south of France, and they would have learned it. But then if I got another group of students I would’ve had to explain it again. Then it becomes costly. But now we're all speaking the same language.

Are there still career limitations for women who work from home, and can't go into an office or travel regularly?
Yes, there are still a whole bunch of jobs, which I call greedy jobs, that require the person to go to Tokyo every other weekend, or Zurich once a month, to sign the contract and do the handshake. Amazingly, during the pandemic we discovered you can look your Japanese counterpart in the eye and have the same amount of trust you had when you flew 17 hours to Tokyo. That particularly impacts women who could have never taken those jobs, and they can now.

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I do think having in-person interactions is important, though.
In-person is extremely important. I do some things remote, but I try not to. As a professor, I am here. This is the only way I am going to absorb the ideas of other people. This is exactly where we started with cities. Cities are places where people bump into each other randomly, like molecules. And it's that random bumping into that leads to increases in productivity.

And we only do remote work for certain things and certain times. You can’t construct a building if you’re remote. And there’s still active research on the degree to which individuals who work remotely 100% are doing the same level of creativity and are as effective as if they were 90/10 or 80/20 or 70/30; that’s something that we don’t know. We do know that many of the titans of industry want people to go whole-hog back into the office and that’s not going to happen.

So it's not that all women—or men, or anyone—will be better off only working from home all the time. How could we characterize who benefits most from the ability to work from home?
If you have a child or an elderly parent, or anyone you love and want to care for, and you may be called at any moment of the day to do something. You are thus the on-call, at-home person.

Is there any evidence to show that more men are now becoming that on-call person?
Not yet. It's very, very hard to get at and we haven't had a lot of time since this has fallen into place. We do have some evidence that it doesn't necessarily happen. The New York Times had a photo series where they went into peoples' homes during the pandemic, which was quite amazing. There was a photo of the women in the bathroom with her child on the potty. She's taking care of this kid, and then right next door is the father of the child, her husband, working at his desk, who didn't have any sense that anything as going on. They're both home, but one is actually the on-call, at-home parent, and the other one is, "See no evil, hear no evil."

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Read more of Claudia Goldin's work in her books Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (2021) and The Race between Education and Technology (2010).