A Harvard professor has won the Nobel Prize for economics for her work on women’s participation in the labour market.
Claudia Goldin was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for her research on the factors behind gender pay gaps.
One of her key arguments is that economic growth does not always improve female labour market outcomes, or narrow gender pay gaps.
During the 20th century, women’s education levels have increased and in most high-income countries are now higher than for men. Female participation in the labour market, over the past 200 years, has formed a U-shape curve.
One of the key historic factors in female workplace participation was the introduction of the contraceptive pill, which offered new opportunities for career planning.
Gender pay gap
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said of her research: “Despite modernisation, economic growth and rising proportions of employed women in the twentieth century, for a long period of time the earnings gap between women and men hardly closed.
“According to Goldin, part of the explanation is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age.
“If the expectations of young women are formed by the experiences of previous generations – for instance, their mothers, who did not go back to work until the children had grown up – then development will be slow.”
Professor Goldin’s work has shown that the bulk of earnings gaps can be explained by differences in education and occupational choices. Crucially, the bulk of the gender pay gap “is now between men and women in the same occupation”, and it largely arises with the birth of a woman’s first child.
The academy said Professor Goldin trawled through archives, often compiling and correcting historical data, “to present new and often surprising facts”.
She is only the third woman to win the Nobel economics prize, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
Jakob Svensson, chair of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said: “Understanding women’s role in the labour is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future.”
Professor Goldin wins 11 million Swedish kronor (approx. £820,000). While the Nobel economics prize is not one of the original prizes awarded by Alfred Nobel, it has been around since 1968 when it was created by Sweden’s central bank in his honour.
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