Breathe
By Mónica Hernández
The news is getting darker every day, more discouraging. No one remembers the war in Ukraine, nor the missing Ukrainian children, nor the victims of that war, upon which autumn and soon another winter are descending. The horrors of what is happening in Gaza, with Israelis and Palestinians, is disheartening. To distract oneself, one looks over the social networks and finds crematorium ovens in Jalisco, with deaths left and right, all senseless. And by disheartening I mean that device that removes the heart from apples and olives. So there's a hole in your chest from watching the news. You want to turn off the screens, but there's a kind of magnet that keeps you plugged into them.
And in the midst of so much horror, a light is lit, a small one, it is true, almost a spark, but it does not stop shining, if it has not yet been kindled. Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics a few days ago, and she is only the third woman to receive the prize. She is only the third woman to receive the award and the first to do it alone (the previous ones had shared it with her colleagues). In addition to the gala ceremony at the Oslo City Hall, and the check for ten million Swedish kronor (one million euros or about twenty-five million pesos, minus taxes plus tip), the prize recognizes not only the contribution of women to the world economy, but also that the economy, with a gender approach, is a reality.
What is gender economics?
Dr. Goldin studied the female labor market in the space of 200 years. We all already knew that there is a gap between what men contribute - and get paid - for the same work, versus what women contribute and get paid. Years ago, it was assumed that some issues of progress, such as technology, would close that gap. But what no one had analyzed, let alone verbalized, was that this has not been the case. Yes, there have been "spikes," such as the introduction of the birth control pill, that have thrown women en masse into the workforce. Others must have been wars, because women, who traditionally did not go to the front lines, were left in charge of the production of goods and services while the men were torn to pieces. Then, as it could not be otherwise, they moved away from productivity to take care of the crippled and sick from the same wars. These swings could be demonstrated more or less easily. But there is another, a deeper and at the same time more significant one, which makes all the difference.
What is this detail, which makes women have a horseshoe-shaped, u-shaped work behavior?
Here it goes: the birth of the first child. And that "u" can become a "w" when they have their second. Or a zero to the left if they have more. What are the implications of this? It's not the ability, it's not the readiness, it's not the determination. It is the decision (voluntary or not, we won't go into this for now) to have children that drives women away from the labor market. This means that work is not flexible. That it is rigid, that it is unwieldy, that it is masculine. Unflexible, because when a woman has a child and has to do her job (yes, motherhood is a job and a demanding and exhausting one), she finishes what she has to do in her office and throws herself into parenting. A woman with a child (let alone more) can't attend the after-hours office meetings, the three-day planning meetings, or those impromptu lunches. Nor that networking that is so necessary to move up the career ladder. And if she does, she misses the piñatas, the unplanned play-dates with the child's friends, the ones that teach him to socialize from the time he is able to crawl. This woman-mother looks bad at work, with her child, with motherhood, with herself. And let's not even talk about the husband (if there is one), the house, the neighbors, the friends, the relatives. We look worse with the gym, with a balanced diet, with shampoo advertisement hair and with a beach watcher's backside. Whatever we do, we will look bad, because there are no hours in the day to meet all the proposed goals. So you have to choose, once you have chosen to have a child (from the womb or from the heart, which is none of our business).
What is gender economics? Goldin did a study in 2000 and proposed hiring musicians to play behind a screen, so that all that could be heard was their performance and not what they looked like. Not their gender. Of course, the experiment showed that discrimination - not just gender, but race - did exist in the hiring of musicians. Women and non-Aryan musicians were offered lower contracts than their white and male counterparts. It reminds me of a job of my own, where it was explained to me, upon being asked if I planned to be a mom, that a female executive was "expensive" for the company. Because the company trained her, paid her, trained her... only for her to "get" pregnant and "throw away" the job. The worst thing is that the reasoning seemed reasonable to me. I'm talking about the year 2009, not the upper paleolithic.
Yes, the gender economy exists. The gender economy is possible. What can we do to close this gap? Make work more flexible. Compensate for work delivered and not for hours-long hours in a chair in an office. Hire women who have children (believe me, in most cases, they meet the deadlines, because what we lack is precisely time and we do not waste it). Public policies should be focused on an undeniable reality: there are women who have (some of us even give birth to) children. There are women who are mothers and who need to work (the origin of this need is not the subject of this column). And this reality must be incorporated into the economy.
May the Nobel Prize to Claudia Goldin shed light on this need, which has no gender and belongs to everyone. Or what? Don't we all have or had a mother?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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