Five things women need to thrive at work

Goldin finds that the gender earnings gap is driven largely by how work is organized within occupations, not by differences between them.² Managers shape that environment day to day. McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace study found that compared with men, fewer entry-level women receive the kinds of career-boosting support that senior colleagues can provide, including being given projects aligned with their career goals and being told what it takes to advance.⁴

Beyond formal evaluations, the gap can widen in less visible ways. Research by Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund, and Weingart found that women are more likely than men to volunteer for, be asked to do, and accept tasks that benefit the organization but rarely lead to advancement. Both men and women were more likely to direct these requests to women, and women were more likely to say yes.⁵

A major barrier to thriving at work is what Goldin describes as the high price of flexibility. In many of the highest-paid professions, working fewer or more flexible hours comes with a steep earnings penalty. But those penalties vary dramatically depending on how a job is designed. In pharmacy, where standardized systems allow any licensed pharmacist to pick up where a colleague left off, part-time work carries almost no wage penalty. In law and finance, where individual availability is harder to substitute, the penalties remain steep.²

When flexibility comes without a professional penalty, it benefits the entire workforce. Designing roles around substitutability, where colleagues can hand off tasks without losing continuity, is central to reducing the cost that the Nobel laureate's research describes.²

Claudia Goldin's research also documents how women who reduce hours or shift to more flexible roles often move into positions that are less well compensated and offer fewer paths to senior roles.² One way to maintain visibility during these transitions is through sponsorship. The same Women in the Workplace 2025 study found that employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without, yet women remain less likely than men to have one.⁴

Goldin, in a 2024 study with economists Sari Pekkala Kerr and Claudia Olivetti, found that mothers often shift into less time-intensive jobs and firms, and even when they increase their hours as children grow up, they do not close the earnings gap with fathers.⁶

If earnings remain tied to years of uninterrupted, full-time work rather than to what someone actually produces, mothers who stepped back will always carry that penalty, regardless of how much they ramp up later. When evaluation criteria are tied to output rather than presence, there is less room for these dynamics to influence who advances.