The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family. NBER Working Paper No. 11953.

By Claudia Goldin. 2006

1,724 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The modern economic role of women emerged in four phases. The first three were evolutionary; the last was revolutionary. Phase I occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s; Phase II was from 1930 to 1950; Phase III extended from 1950 to the late 1970s; and Phase IV, the "quiet revolution," began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing. Three aspects of women's choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases: horizon, identity, and decision-making. The evolutionary phases are apparent in time-series data on labor force participation. The revolutionary phase is discernible using time-series evidence on women's more predictable attachment to the workplace, greater identity with career, and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses. Each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change. These changes, moreover, coincide by birth cohort or period. The relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women's changing economic role is explored. The paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed. Women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not "opt-out,"but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate.

Subfields: Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99bfe2222e8443a152cbb137ca26955258b581a2

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Citations in the corpus

Why do people postpone parenthood? Reasons and social policy incentives. (2011, background): “As educational, employment and career opportunities opened for women, they could choose between motherhood and other activities, which have fundamentally altered the temporal pattern of reproductive behaviour (Van de Kaa, 1987; Goldin, 2006).”
Gender Differences in Education (2012, background): “Both Turner and Boven 10 (1999) and Goldin (2006) show that the dissimilarity index of college majors in the United States declined from close to 50 in 1970 to around 20 in 1994.4 According to the World Bank data, the US dissimilarity index was still at 22 in 2009 which is the lowest figure in the…”
Labour Market Effects of Parental Leave Policies in OECD Countries (2013, background): “They are also likely to benefit even further over time, as there is evidence that whole generations of women have been influenced by the shift in women’s identity from a family-centred world to a more career-oriented one (Goldin and Katz, 2002; Goldin, 2006).”
A World of Difference: International Trends in Women's Economic Status (2011, background): “…organized sectors (between elite universities and lower-status vocational institutions) has declined in industrial societies, in- equalities across dimensions that are less explicitly hierarchical, such as fields of study, appear more resistant to change (Goldin 2006, Shavit et al. 2007).”
Are early stage investors biased against women? (2020, background): “The persistence of this gap over time runs counter to more general labor market trends (Goldin, 2006).”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, positive): “…economic development, and changes in the production structure of the economy are likely to have contributed to the altering of women’s identity and changing gender roles in the later half of the 1990s (Goldin and Katz, 2002; Greenwood et al., 2005; Goldin, 2006; Albanesi and Olivetti, 2016).”
From Stagnation to Sustained Growth: The Role of Female Empowerment (2013, background): “Women related issues have become central to the field of labor economics and economic history (Goldin, 2006); nevertheless it remains rare in the field of economic growth.”
Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data Since 1937 (2010, background): “…and Saez, 2003), (4) panel survey data (primarily the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics) show that short-term rank-based mobility has remained fairly stable (Gottschalk, 1997) since the 1970s, (5) the gender gap has narrowed substantially since the 1970s (Goldin, 1990; Blau, 1998; Goldin, 2006).”