If you were to look at the last 50 or 100 years, you might well think that women have always

been on an upward track when it comes to participation in the workplace.

Developing economic equality for most women means leaving their work at home to join the

labour force.

Over the past century, the proportion of women in paid work has tripled in many developed

high-income countries.

The same place is whether gender pay gap has been getting smaller.

The gender pay gap between full-time working women and their male counterparts is at its

nearest point ever here in the US.

So it'd be easy to conclude that economic growth is the driver of positive change for

women in the labour market.

And that was the received wisdom until one woman decided it was time to start asking

question.

I've always wanted to be a detective, I've been a detective since I was a little kid.

Claudia Golden is an American economist and in the 1980s, she decided to go back further

and investigate what women's work looked like over the past 200 years of American history.

Being a detective means that you have a question and the question is so important that you

will go to any end to find it.

That involved digging deep into the archives and pulling out data that people thought didn't

even exist.

In addition, the detective always believes that there is a way of finding the answer.

The answer that Claudia found is that during the steady economic growth in the 200 year period

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