The UBC Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality is pleased to be hosting Savannah Noray, a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Harvard University, as part of the 2025 Stone Inequality Seminar Series. Noray will be presenting her paper, titled “Can Women ‘Have It All’? The Trade-Off Between Social Tasks and Workplace Flexibility.”
Abstract
Do the jobs best suited to women’s talents offer the flexibility that they need? I document that temporal flexibility and social skill intensity are inversely correlated across occupations. Guided by an occupational choice model, I show evidence that this correlation generates a trade-off between women’s preference for flexible work hours and their comparative advantage in social tasks. As a consequence, women’s relative labor market returns to both flexibility and social skills are attenuated, which in turn widens the gender wage gap. Event-studies around first births — a shock to women’s relative demand for flexibility — help confirm that gender gaps in inflexible jobs are driven by women’s time constraints rather than other factors.
Event Details
Date: April 15, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
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Savannah Noray is a PhD candidate in Public Policy (economics track) at Harvard University. Her research focuses on labor economics and gender, exploring how workplace features shape women’s labor supply, how household decisions spill over into the workplace, and how gender differences influence broader political and social trends.