Is everyone sitting down? It seems that economists and sociologists–and, of course, the New York Times–have unearthed the root cause of a problem that has bedeviled us lo these many decades: the “gender gaps in seniority and pay” between highly educated professional women and highly educated professional men. The culprit? Our “greedy,” “winner-take-all” economy, in which the reward for working longer hours is greater than that for working fewer hours. As Indiana University sociologist Youngjoo Cha explains, “the reward to become the winner is a lot higher now than in the past. You have to stick out among workers, and one way is by your hours.’”

Take Daniela Jampel and Matthew Schneid, chief exemplars in the Times’s story, “Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’” Daniela and Matthew are both lawyers; both started out at big firms with the prospect of big bucks once they got through the associates’ indentured servitude. But then, uh oh . . . Children! Someone had to take care of them, and somehow, someway that someone was their mother.

Daniela now “works 21 hours a week as a lawyer for New York City, a job that enables her to spend two days a week at home with their children, ages 5 and 1, and to shuffle her hours if something urgent comes up. He’s a partner at a midsize law firm and works 60-hour weeks—up to 80 if he’s closing a big deal—and is on call nights and weekends.” And guess what? He makes 4 to 6 times what she does. Matthew feels that he’d “be happier in life if I was home more with my children and if I didn’t have the same stress at work.” Daniela is “angry that the time she spends caregiving isn’t valued the way paid work is.”

This kind of sad situation, the Times explains, is “particularly true in managerial jobs and what social scientists call the greedy professions, like finance, law and consulting—an unintentional side effect of the nation’s embrace of a winner-take-all economy. It’s so powerful, researchers say, that it has canceled the effect of women’s educational gains.”

What to do, what to do? Simple: We just have to change work. We have to “take down” what Harvard economist Claudia Goldin describes as “this system we put in place in the era of ‘Mad Men’ and we’re stuck with.”

The “ultimate solution” is “to reorganize work so that nobody has to” work too hard. According to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom,“Firms have enormous incentive to really design jobs so they can access these highly educated people who want to work 40 hours a week and not 80.’”

In short, we just have to rid ourselves of this outdated idea that people who work more should be paid more. We need to recognize that people are interchangeable, and no one is irreplaceable or more valuable than anyone else. That way, everyone can share all the hours, and all the money; they can work only as many hours as their little hearts desire, and everyone can live happily ever after.

Huh. Why didn’t we think of that before?

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