Author
Sometimes, the best way to understand an idea is to meet the people who devote their time and energy to studying it.
The Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute’s mission to conduct and promote research that will advance economic opportunity and inclusive growth for all Americans means engaging with scholars who approach opportunity and inclusion from many angles. This series of short Q&As spotlights those individuals, what led them to economics, and how their research connects to opportunity and inclusion.
For this installment, we sat down with Olga Stoddard, associate professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, to discuss incentives, gender inequality, and resilience.
What made you decide to study economics?
I wasn’t originally an economics major in my undergrad studies. I was a business major, so I was taking lots of business classes and econ was one of the requirements. In my very first economics class I thought, “Oh, I’m in the wrong major. I like this so much more.”
I was really intrigued by economics, by the way of thinking like an economist, by concepts that were simple yet really profound, like opportunity costs, marginal thinking, and externalities.
But I didn’t switch to an econ major until I took a class on economic development. Economic development is really what got me interested in economics. I think part of it was that I grew up in Russia and there was a lot of poverty and inequality at the time. Seeing firsthand some of the economic struggles and inequality led me to think about ways to close some of the gaps and how to make the economy work for everybody.
So I wanted to be a development economist. I read Poor Economics, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, and really was intrigued with thinking about alleviating poverty through economic tools.
What do you think is the most useful idea in economics?
It’s hard to narrow it down to just one. I think in my research what I’ve found is this simple idea that can be so powerful, which is that incentives matter and that people respond to them. Even small changes in incentives can lead to really powerful changes in behavior. Whether it’s financial incentives or moral incentives or social incentives, trying to understand how these incentives shape behavior has been really interesting, and it has been a theme in a lot of my work.
What are you studying now?
One project I’m really excited about is understanding the gender gap in the invisible mental load. This is all of the different tasks associated with managing a household and all the child care and household-related activities.
What we’re finding is that the invisible mental load disproportionately falls on women. Even in dual-earner households where you have two parents with children, women tend to do disproportionately more of that kind of worrying, organizing, coordinating of the different tasks and activities that are required in keeping the household running.
So this project aims to first document that there is a gender gap in the invisible load. We already know that there’s a gender gap in the visible tasks, things like who is cooking dinner, who is doing the housework, who is spending time and coordinating child care. What we don’t know currently is whether that gender gap extends to the invisible load.
We’re trying to document the invisible load rigorously, and we’re also trying to understand potential reasons why this gender gap in the mental load exists. Why are women doing more of it? Is it part of social norms, an expectation that this should fall on the shoulders of mothers? How can we first understand why it exists, and also potential solutions? How could we make the distribution of these tasks more equitable within households?
What are you looking to study next?
Next what we want to do is understand how this gender gap in the invisible mental load, or cognitive load, contributes to the gender pay gap and labor market outcomes.
Why does it matter that women are doing more of the worrying and coordinating of household and child-related tasks? How does that impact some of the outcomes for them in their jobs? Does it impact their career progression? Does it lead them to be more likely to choose to stay home or work part time? Does it impact the persistent gender wage gaps that we observe in the labor market?
How does your research relate to economic opportunity and inclusive growth?
For any economy to be efficient, we need to make sure that there’s economic opportunity created for all. We need to maximize economic opportunity and human capital that is being used.
Since mental load, as I mentioned, disproportionately falls on women, even in dual-earner households, it limits women’s time and energy for paid work and professional advancement. It may contribute to some interruptions in the labor market as well as underemployment.
When I think about how our research contributes to inclusive growth and economic opportunities for all, I think of this idea that redistributing or reducing mental load can enable more equal participation for women in the labor market. It can enhance overall productivity of all the human capital, and as a result lead to greater economic output and more growth. And it also helps us understand how to design better institutions or better systems that can help households and that can help organizations create environments in which that important labor is being more equitably distributed.
Is there an important economic statistic that you think people should know about or one that has surprised you?
I think something that surprised me when we started doing this work, maybe not the direction but the magnitude, is that in two-parent households where both men and women work full time, women do 50 percent more household and child-related tasks than men.
This is a statistic that comes from the American Time Use Survey, and when we first looked at it, I thought, “Oh, for sure we’ll see women doing more than men,” but the 50 percent number really struck me as a significant gap.
You can think of it as the “second shift.” Both people work full time and yet women are doing so much more of these additional tasks when they’re coming home from work or when they’re at work and they’re trying to multitask.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve read or received?
Failing early. There are going to be projects that are going to be successful, but there are also going to be projects where you realize it’s just not panning out, it’s not working in the way that you expected, or you’re not going to get the data that you were hoping for.
Early on in my career, I think I held on to those projects and still exerted a lot of effort to try to make sure that that wasn’t wasted time. The advice I got at some point was that failure is going to be a significant part of this job, and the earlier you realize that the project is not going to be successful, the lower the cost is going to be.
Another thing would be not taking rejections and failures personally. There’s a lot of rejection in this profession. As an academic economist, you’re constantly being told that your work is not good enough, that you are not smart enough, or that you might not belong.
You deal with a lot with rejection and negative feedback. You need to be resilient and take the constructive part of the criticism to make the project better. When you get rejected, try to get up and keep going, try another journal, try another conference.
Is there something you would say to your younger self or somebody else going down a similar path?
One thing that comes to mind is find your people. In every job there are going to be people that you connect with, that you share similar values with, and that you work well with. There are also going to be some people that you don’t work as well with.
For me, finding collaborators that really make it so enjoyable to wake up and work on the projects, that has been a game changer.
It’s going to look different for everybody, but for me, what helped was organizing sessions at conferences and getting to know people on a personal level that are doing related work. That really helped me find my people in this profession.
If you could do any other job for a day, what would it be?
I actually went to law school for a year because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer—and honestly, I think that would still be my answer. I’d love to spend a day in the courtroom, maybe defending someone or delivering a closing argument. That career path has always had a strong pull for me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
