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Friday, 22 July 2016

Tearing down gender barriers in the workforce

While overt discrimination in some markets are on the wane, women are still subtly penalized by all sorts of societal conventions. Freakonomics Radio looked into how those penalties can be removed “without burning down the house.” Harvard Economist, Claudia Goldin, says it women might be receiving lower pay than men for equal work in some cases, but by and large, it’s not that, it’s that men had monopolised the lucrative professions. Partly to blame are societal factors that still see men as “the supporters of their families,” but there was also willful exclusion in order to protect male privileges, and it also took “ too long for the feminization of the workforce to happen but not necessarily because of ill will.” Societal constructs were also to blame; “we’re processing language differently based on whether a woman or man is doing the speaking.” Host Stephen Dubner discusses some solutions that could be implemented to redesign the system, “so that success is not dependent on every decision being a good one.”(Runtime 36:29)

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