Why Obama’s Gender-Pay Disclosure Rule Misses The Mark

The pay gap is just one example of what women have to contend with in the workplace – in particular at high echelon venues like law firms – and Huffington Post writer Emily Peck approves of the President’s proposal for mandatory disclosure of pay differential between genders. But she maintains it doesn’t address the main issue, citing Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, “one of the leading economists studying the gender pay gap.” Goldin argues that the gender pay gap is part of a larger cultural phenomenon: Women are under extreme pressure to enter into a bargain whereby they trade pay for the flexibility to handle family responsibilities. According to Goldin, there is one concrete and relatively uncontroversial reform that would in a single stroke remove a major institutional underpinning of that dynamic.