The large-scale entry of women into the paid labor force during the twentieth century is a significant historical event. Not only did women enter the workforce in large numbers, they increasingly combined marriage, childbearing, and market work. Moreover, women increasingly occupied “careers” rather than “jobs,” distinguished by their anticipated time frame and centrality to a person’s identity. In Career & Family, Claudia Goldin offers a detailed history of this transition for American college-educated women. Goldin frames “career” and “family” as two equally compelling, but some-times contradictory, aspirations. She documents the changing ways in which American college-educated women have been able to combine these aspirations, and she identifies the barriers that remain.

The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first is a history of the relation-ship between career and family for American college-educated women. Goldin classifies these women into five groups. Group One graduated from college between 1900 and 1920 and faced a stark choice between achieving a career and having a family. Group Two graduated between 1920 and 1945 and tended to hold jobs before marrying and having children. Group Three graduated between 1946 and 1965 and took jobs after their children entered school. Group Four graduated during the late 1960s and 1970s and attained careers before starting a family. Group Five, graduating after 1980, was the first to combine career and family in large numbers. Goldin devotes a chapter to each group’s experience (Chapters 3–8), emphasizing the ways in which each cohort’s progress paved the way for those to follow.

In the second part of the book (Chapters 8–10), Goldin observes that, despite the considerable progress documented in the previous chapters, college women still do not combine career and family as seamlessly as do college men. She argues that the source of this disparity is the high return to specialization within the household, especially for certain white-collar professionals. Goldin uses the phrase “greedy work” to describe professions in which the implied hourly wage increases with hours worked. A high return to working long hours encourages couples to specialize, with one “on call” at work and the other “on call” at home. More often than not, women assume the latter role. Goldin notes that such a disparity within the family manifests in aggregate as a gender gap in earnings and career achievement.

The book is written in a style that is accessible to a non-specialist audience. The first part of the book, which documents the transition from Group One to Group Five, is primarily descriptive. Throughout these chapters, Goldin discusses a number of compel-ling explanations for group-to-group transitions, including institutions, social norms, a structural shift away from manufacturing, and medical advances like the birth control pill and assisted reproductive technologies. However, she focuses on documenting in detail the experiences and outcomes of each cohort of women and drawing a line from one to the other. Descriptive aggregate figures are interspersed with anecdotes from popular culture or the biographies of notable women from each cohort. The result is a pleasure to read. To give a memorable example, Chapter Three is bookended by a poignant tribute to economist Margaret Gilpin Reid, a “notable” from Group One, who was an Emeritus Professor while Goldin was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. This will surely resonate with young economists who have taken inspiration from Goldin herself.

The final chapters of the book, which make the case that “greedy work” is a barrier to women combining career and family, are extremely thought-provoking. In Chapter Nine, for instance, Goldin draws a detailed comparison between two skilled, white-collar professions: pharmacy and law. As a rule, pharmacists are able to transition work to colleagues with ease. One pharmacist working 10 hours is roughly equivalent to two pharmacists working five hours apiece. As there is no hourly wage premium associated with working additional hours, pharmacy is quite flexible and compatible with raising children. There is almost no gender pay gap among pharmacists, and female pharma-cists frequently combine work and family.

On the contrary, lawyers experience a large hourly wage premium if they increase their hours worked. This stems in part from the expectation that individual lawyers be “on call” for their own clients at all times. As such, lawyers have a strong incentive to work long hours, which is not at all compatible with being “on call” at home. This pushes a large number of female law school graduates out of the profession and contrib-utes to a large gender pay gap among lawyers.

The argument linking the “greediness” of work to the remaining gender gap in career outcomes is clear and compelling. The comparison between pharmacy and law is espe-cially interesting for what it suggests about whether or not “greedy work” is here to stay. Goldin points out that, in the mid-twentieth century, pharmacy was as “greedy” as the law. Pharmacists were typically small business owners who had personal relationships with clients and had to be available to fill prescriptions around the clock. The advent of large chain pharmacies has meant that pharmacists are increasingly employees rather than entrepreneurs. This, along with the standardization of drugs, has made pharmacist colleagues good substitutes for one another. The optimistic message is that the “greedi-ness” of a particular profession is not an immutable trait but can evolve over time. Perhaps a similar evolution will occur in other professions.

The less optimistic view is that changes in the nature of pharmacy were not rooted in a desire for gender equity. Rather, technological and institutional changes in that industry made flexibility and worker substitutability more efficient. If increased flex-ibility and substitutability are not efficiency-enhancing in other industries, there is no reason to expect similar changes to occur organically. The book has a timely epilogue that discusses ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic may impede or hasten these changes.

To conclude, Career & Family tells a compelling story about the progress of American college-educated women over the course of the twentieth century. Though rigorous and meticulously sourced, it is accessible to most readers. The material on “greedy work” is convincing and thought-provoking. I expect it to inspire many research questions in the years to come.