S4E9: Francine Blau, Gender and Labor Economics, Cornell University

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Episode 9, season 4. And I just did the math, and we are at 113 episodes so far since I started. What a fun journey it’s been too. So many interesting people, so many interesting stories, so much fun to connect with them and be, for just one hour, getting to hear them all.

For those new to the podcast, this is a podcast about the personal stories of living economists where I listen to them share parts of the arc of their journey. Primarily as their life moving towards being an economist and having been one. It moves between the personal and professional in whatever way feels right at the moment. And this week’s guest is Francine Blau. Dr. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and she’s had a long and prolific career studying two overlapping topics — labor economics and the gender wage gap. She is, if I can say it, the labor economist’s labor economist. Deep labor economics, relevant, empirical, pioneering. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be in the room with her at SOLE meetings and seminars from the very start.

In the interview, we learn a lot about her life. We discussed what it was like at Harvard in the early 1970s, why she chose Harvard over MIT, her father’s difficult story as a teacher in the NYC during a difficult time in US political history involving the unions, certain university’s bans on allowing women into their PhD programs (e.g., Princeton), and the importance that Richard Freeman had on her committee in what she ultimately ended up writing a dissertation on, which I’ll explain in a moment. I promised her an hour, so some of the things I’d wanted to ask, like how she saw the credibility revolution emerge around her, I never got to get to. But I loved what we did get to cover, and wish I had had another hour with her.

If I can geek out for just a moment, this is a bit of a longer opener as I normally write, but Francine Blau was truly a pioneer and I’ll just mention one thing — her dissertation. I kind of knew that she was a pioneer because I knew about her full body of work, which is frankly gigantic, which was why I wanted to interview her in the first place, but to be honest, I really didn’t know the start and that context at all. I think it’s fair to say that she was one of the very first economists to be focused on the gender wage gap. I think maybe Claudia Goldin, which I’ll mention in a second, would be an exception in that perhaps it’s a tie between them. There had been obviously work on the economics of discrimination; that had been Gary Becker’s dissertation topic at the University of Chicago in 1955. And Dr. Blau suggested that both Claudia Goldin and Yoram Ben-Porath had also worked on that, but in terms of timing, I think that Dr. Blau predates Ben-Porath but not necessarily Dr. Goldin. Dr. Goldin’s first publication on the gender differences is a 1977 article in the Journal of Economic History entitled “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 to 1880” and I don’t think anything Dr. Ben-Porath wrote when Dr. Blau had graduated in 1975 from Harvard. Probably of those two, it would be Goldin’s JEH that would be the closest to something as in-depth and which had comparable calendar date timing as to what and when Dr. Blau published her dissertation (as a book in 1977), but very different in that it was contemporary, not historical, and it concerned women in the modern work place, and specifically within the firm itself.

Dr. Blau’s dissertation was unlike the current style of dissertations which is the “three essay” model. It was a book length dissertation which she published in 1977 entitled Equal Pay in the Office. It was a 1975 dissertation that far predates the work that would come much later on the personnel economics literature we associate with Ed Lazear and Sherwin Rosen. Her dissertation explores many topics that would’ve perfectly fit into that material, but predates it by maybe 10 years arguably, and focuses intently on gender wage disparities between male and female office workers in the United States. She in that dissertation, written partly under the guidance of the labor economist Richard Freeman, examined the extent of wage differentials in the office place, explores the factors contributing to these disparities, and evaluates the effectiveness of equal pay legislation in addressing gender-based wage inequality. I found a copy of it, which I think may be out of print, and am ordering it now, but from what I have been able to gather, it was way ahead of its time, and I mean that.

Dr. Blau is a role model for many people, myself included. The steady march of her career, the consistency, the work ethic, the creativity — it’s the hallmark of a great economist and great scholar. I asked her how she managed to do it and it was interesting what she told me — she attributed a desire to not let down her coauthors as part of how she’s managed to maintain that steady body of work for the last 50 years. That’s a lesson I’m going to try to remember going forward.

This is again a great interview to share. Share with friends, family, students and colleagues, mentors, people outside economics, people inside economics. I was very inspired by the interview and hope you are too.

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