We should acknowledge that discrimination still exists and that women’s work lives have been considerably improved by their ability to legally challenge discriminatory practices.Sex discrimination against women ; Women - Employment ; Discrimination in employment

Lisa M. Lynch

English

Research Papers in Economics

56 REGIONAL REVIEW Q1 2005
WOMEN’S ROLE IN THE MACROECONOMY 4
considering 
the impact of 
women’s paid 
and unpaid 
work
by lisa m. lynch
comments
on ‘spinning 
  the top’Q1 2005 REGIONAL REVIEW 57 
ancy folbre has written an interesting and provoc-
ative piece challenging the premise that reaching the top in 
the private sector represents the global maximum in career 
goals. Examining the biology of gender differences, she 
looks at whether being successful at work makes women 
less desirable mates and whether evolution has resulted in men with 
a more competitive winner-take-all attitude, while women are more 
generous and cooperative. She also asks us to reconsider the role of 
competition within our economic system and argues that this requires 
an explicit accounting of unpaid work in the home when measuring 
gross domestic product (GDP) in national income accounts.
Measuring the contribution to GDP of unpaid work would cer-
tainly be worthwhile and might even prove useful in efforts to com-
pare cross-national trends in macroeconomic productivity. In a re-
cent paper, MIT economics professor Olivier Blanchard points out 
that while productivity is higher in the United States when measured 
by output per worker, it is higher in many European countries when 
measured by output per hour of work. He argues that Europeans 
have chosen to work harder but fewer hours. As a result, they con-
sume more leisure. What he does not discuss is whether some of 
this “leisure” may actually be time spent in household work such as 
raising children. It would be interesting to examine investments in 
child rearing in more detail as this might have ramiﬁcations for future 
productivity trends. But it is extremely difﬁcult to come up with good 
data on this front. Measuring the output produced by services that 
are bought and sold in the marketplace has been challenging; doing 
so for services without a market price would be no easy task.
I would like to raise three additional points relevant to the quantity 
and quality of women’s labor supply. 
skills, training, and the time shortage. Economists 
and policy makers have highlighted the degree to which wage in-
equality is driven by skill differences. Yet, working women who want 
to raise their wages by getting additional education and training face 
the extra burden of a time crunch. While some progress has been 
made in the division of labor in household tasks, women still bear a 
disproportionate share of household work (see page 30). This con-
strains women’s ability to invest in training programs that take place 
outside work hours and creates a vicious circle with respect to their 
career advancement prospects. Women are less likely to participate in 
employer-funded after-hours programs and thus less able to apply for 
new career opportunities. As a consequence, they may be viewed by 
senior management as less committed  than their male colleagues.
is there a work-family tradeoff? Sociologists such as 
Robin Simon have highlighted the fact that women who work are 
happier than women who don’t. However, Simon also ﬁnds that 
working men and women react to the pressures and stresses of bal-
ancing job and family very differently. Men are socialized to view 
working harder at their job as consistent with caring for their families 
and their role as good providers. However, women are more likely to 
think of work and family as a zero-sum game—time spent at work is 
time not at home caring for their families, leading to increased stress 
and depression. This may play an important role in the apparent deci-
sion to “opt out” of work by some professional women. 
the increasing importance of soft skills. In our re-
search, Sandra Black and I observed that as U.S. companies invested 
in new technology and adopted new forms of organizational design 
during the 1980s and 1990s, they also placed an increased premium 
on their employees’ “soft skills.” Other researchers, including Boning 
and colleagues, have reached similar ﬁndings. The ability to collabo-
rate and work in teams, to be problem solvers, to be ﬂexible, and to 
have good communication skills should favor women, since it plays to 
their socialization. This research also suggests that today’s workplace 
is characterized not simply by “winner-take-all” (or reward the “lone 
rangers”), but by an increasingly important role for cooperation and 
ﬂexibility.
Implications for policy
So what should we do? With respect to government policy, we should 
acknowledge that discrimination still exists and that women’s work 
lives have been considerably improved by their ability to legally chal-
lenge discriminatory practices. In addition, it is important to con-
tinue to press government to use its economic might as a customer 
to promote change. Finally, the importance of early investment on 
children’s subsequent education, social, and employment outcomes 
is well established. Government policies that ensure that female (and 
male) workers have access to quality child care regardless of income 
will help more families to be effective as both parents and workers. 
As for employers, they need to maintain their vigilance against dis-
crimination—both the overt and subtle forms, as Barbara Reskin’s 
paper makes clear. This requires that they explicitly measure and 
reward antidiscriminatory efforts. In addition, employers should 
recognize that relying on employees to engage in voluntary training 
outside normal work hours may well mean disproportionately fewer 
women advancing within their organizations. They also need to rec-
ognize the increasing importance of developing and promoting team 
players, not just “lone rangers.”
And individuals need to lobby government and employers for 
workplace policies that support employee development and recog-
nize men’s and women’s responsibilities outside the workplace. We 
should use our position as shareholders to urge ﬁrms to increase the 
proportion of women in top management and directors’ positions. 
Finally, we should be active as parents and community members in 
schools, where much of girls’ and boys’ socialization takes place. S
Lisa M. Lynch is the William L. Clayton Professor of International 
Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at 
Tufts University and a member of the Board of Directors of the  
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
N
“Measuring Organizational Capital in the New Economy, ” by Sandra E. Black 
and Lisa M. Lynch, National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on 
Research in Income and Wealth, April 2002, www.nber.org/~confer/2002/
criws02/lynch.pdf.
“Revisiting the Relationships among Gender, Marital Status, and Mental 
Health, ” by Robin Simon, American Journal of Sociology, 2002.
“Opportunity Counts: Teams and the E�ectiveness of Production Incen-
tives, ” by Brent Boning, Casey Ichniowski, and Kathryn Shaw, National Bureau 
of Economic Research Working Paper 8306, May 2001.
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Comments on spinning the top: considering the impact of women's paid and unpaid work

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