You don’t need a Nobel prize to know that work has got greedy. Time we all pushed back

You don’t have to dig very hard on the internet to find the gender pay gap conspiracists. More rational than flat-earthers, less voluble than vaccine sceptics, they spend their time explaining away data gathered over decades as misleading, misunderstood, an invention of the culture wars, or a product of women’s own choices.

Some of this criticism is reasonable: the data can be a crude measure and doesn’t take into account things like part-time work. Others suggest the fact that women are more likely to be doing part-time work is a feature of the problem.

But however you slice it, there is a pay gap: women in Europe earned 13 per cent on average less per hour than men in 2021, Eurostat data shows, and 9.9 per cent less in Ireland.

And it’s not because women aren’t ambitious enough, or because women choose to lean out, or because they would simply prefer to be at home wrestling with the lid on the laundry detergent than wrangling with the numbers on a spreadsheet. Women are not, contrary to what some of the pay gap conspiracists would have you believe, just better at that stuff — “that stuff” being a useful catch-all term for everything that doesn’t pay.

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What is true is that they do lots more of “that stuff” — that unpaid, unrecognised, yet-the-economy-couldn’t-function-without-it stuff. According to research by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute, Irish women spend double the time men do on caring and more than twice as much time on housework.

As Caroline Criado-Perez points out in her brilliant, game-changing — not that women have time for games — book Invisible Women, there is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There are only women who get paid for working, and women who don’t, and the rest, who get paid for some of it, but spend a lot of time slogging away for free.

Denying that there is a pay gap, or blaming women for it, is gaslighting half the population. Without Claudia Goldin, we might even have fallen for it.

We owe Goldin a debt of gratitude for the unrewarding slog of shattering those tedious stereotypes over decades. She is belatedly getting that recognition: this week she won the Nobel Prize for economics for her work on the gender pay gap, the first woman to be awarded it in her own right, rather than as a co-awardee with a man. (A bit like the subject of her life’s work, it has taken a while.)

The solution is that the labour market and society need to stop valuing long hours and punishing those who want flexible work

Tracking women’s participation in the paid workforce since the late 1800s, she found that it did not grow in tandem with the global economy, as you’d expect. Instead, it followed a U-shaped curve. As work became more industrialised, and more difficult to combine with family life, women began to fall out of the workforce. In some cases, such as Ireland until the 1970s, there were legal barriers to married women working.

As family life became more equal, you might have assumed women would at last soar ahead. And yes, more women now have both a career and a family. But they’re not yet getting equal reward. Meanwhile, men are beginning to bump up against the invisible barriers that have historically held women back in the workplace.

So what’s going on? The issue is a phenomenon Goldin refers to as “greedy work”. The basic premise of greedy work is that longer hours are disproportionately rewarded. For every extra hour you put in, you get a higher hourly rate overall. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: it is only in the last two decades that you earn more by working long hours. Another way to think of it is as a kind of tax on flexibility.

What tends to happen when couples have a family, Goldin says, is that most now start out wanting an equal distribution of work at home, but the incompatibility of family life with the kind of 50-hour weeks that better-paid jobs often require means that one partner opts for flexibility, and the other opts for well-paid greedy work. In some cases, both opt for flexible work and forego higher earnings. The difference between what men and women earn at work is these days less about discrimination and more about our reverence for work, the relentlessness of the digital world, and the way we reward busyness.

Historically, women were more likely to take on the more flexible job, but the issue of greedy work is becoming a source of friction in even traditionally male-dominated professions — take the example of gardaí recently threatening industrial action over their rosters.

The solution is that the labour market and society need to stop valuing long hours and punishing those who want flexible work. “One of the amazing silver linings of the pandemic,” says Goldin, is that this is now happening. We have begun to “reduce the price of flexibility by increasing the productivity of individuals in the more flexible job”.

Other things need to happen too. Gender norms within families about who takes on which responsibilities need to change: men need to start doing even more of “that stuff”. The cost of childcare and care of older people needs to come down, a process that is under way, but not quickly enough.

But mostly, we just need to reject greedy work. The idea is not that we need to put things in place that make it easier for women to work 50-hour weeks or 11- or 12-hour days; it’s that no one should have to work like that.