This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded this week to Claudia Goldin for her work on gender inequality in the workforce.

When I enthusiastically told our People Director this news, she not only said “how interesting” but also rather astutely asked “so what did she find?”. Sheepishly, I had to own up and say I wasn’t exactly sure!

It turns out that a lot of what I thought I knew about gender and labour markets owes a debt to Goldin’s tenacious research over the last several decades. There is a wealth of it, but two ideas stand out to me, not least because I am a personal beneficiary of them both. I have a “greedy job” and a “fatherhood premium”.

First, I have a greedy job. In fact, I suspect most people reading this article have greedy jobs. Lawyers and consultants – or any professional services advisory role – is more or less the canonical example of a greedy job. These are jobs that reward individuals who go above and beyond for their clients, who are ready to go the extra mile just at that exact moment when it is really needed. These high-paying jobs are ‘greedy’ because they are hungry for your time and they dislike moderation. Goldin found that family work choices are heavily (and rationally) influenced by the greedy jobs phenomenon. The household can do better by giving one earner the freedom to feed a greedy job, whilst the other chooses a role that can quarterback family life. No surprise that those choices are often gendered. They were in the Foster household.

I entered Frontier as a new analyst after my master’s degree at age 23. By age 34, I had made it through every promotion to become one of the firm’s Directors. Whenever people ask me about my quick progression, I always point out that, when measured by billable hours, my progress was relatively pedestrian. A wonderful feature of Frontier is that it is a relatively ungreedy employer, despite inhabiting a greedy profession. But in the early years of my career, that didn’t matter too much to me: Frontier also gave me the freedom to work as hard and move as fast as I wanted.

Goldin showed that the cumulative earnings effects of this labour market behaviour are large and, in the language of economics, they are “persistent” – the advantage remains long after the behaviour has changed. This sits in part behind the “motherhood penalty” where time out of the workforce (either entirely or through scaling back working hours) has a lasting effect even after childcare responsibilities are long gone.

By age 34, I also already had two primary school-age children. The eldest had arrived the same year I was heading for my first really major promotion. In Frontier, this is the promotion to manager, when consultants step up to a trio of hard responsibilities: managing teams, managing delivery, and managing clients. In my book it is the hardest job in the company, and the talent and dedication of our group of managers is the single biggest ingredient in our success as a business. What did I do when the awesome responsibility of fatherhood arrived? I took two weeks of paternity leave and carried on at work as if nothing had changed. At the time, it felt like I was an unbelievably modern man. I was comparing myself to our parents’ generation where dads worked and mums kept home. By contrast, when I was at home, the goal was everything equal: I cooked, I cleaned, I did bath times and bedtimes. And my god, was I tired. But that caveat “when I was at home” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I was always given the freedom to put work first, and homelife was hard, hard, hard when I wasn’t around. I’m pleased to see more and more new fathers at Frontier are changing this behaviour and taking much more time to be at home.

And this takes us to the most puzzling finding in the research behind this year’s Nobel. I also almost certainly was able to enjoy (and the stats say I still enjoy) a “fatherhood premium”. This is not just the opposite of the “motherhood penalty”, although it is true that fathers out earn mothers. No, the fatherhood premium is stranger still: a very large part of our remaining gender pay gap is explained by the fact that fathers out-earn men who are not fathers. Fathers in high-paying jobs are perhaps the biggest driver of the gap. The causes of the fatherhood premium are debated. But the evidence does seem to point to men who are either enabled or incentivised to work hard on their career around the time of the arrival of their first child. It is true in my case that the arrival of the first child, the purchase of a first London property, and a major promotion all came in the same year. It certainly would have been a challenge to either afford a mortgage on a consultant salary, or to have raised a baby in our small rented apartment.

The challenge Goldin poses is the same we grapple with at Frontier. She asks “Why do women, not men, step back from these higher-paid opportunities? And how can we make these greedy jobs less demanding without making them less productive?”. We certainly don’t have the answer, but I will be proud for a moment and say that we are taking on that challenge and seeking answers. There are ways of working which mean you can deliver high quality in ‘greedy situations’ without simply creating a lot of individual greedy jobs. Teams with highly effective collaboration, great communication and a level of built-in redundancy not only insulate individual team members from the ‘greedy job’ phenomenon, but they are also more resilient and produce far better outcomes for clients when the situation gets tough. We have on occasion had feedback that our teams have a “feminine quality”, and I take that as both a real badge of honour and a clear break from the old-fashioned and out-of-date view that consulting was a ‘macho’ profession of big egos and punishing long hours.

Goldin’s Nobel is certainly richly deserved. It is hard to think of a subject matter of economic research that is more closely linked to explaining our daily reality or understanding the longer narrative arcs of our working and family lives.