American historian Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Claudia Goldin will receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for “advancing our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”
Claudia Goldin, this year’s Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, presented the first comprehensive assessment of women’s incomes and labor-force participation throughout history.
Her research reveals the drivers of change as well as the primary origins of the lingering gender gap.
Women are severely underrepresented in the global labour market and earn less than men when they do work.
Claudia Goldin combed the archives for nearly 200 years of data from the United States, allowing her to show how and why gender inequalities in incomes and employment rates have changed over time.
Also read: Who is Norwegian author Jon Fosse? The Nobel Prize 2023 winner in Literature
Goldin demonstrated that female labor-force participation did not increase over the entire period, but instead formed a U-shaped curve.
Married women’s participation fell with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but began to rise again with the establishment of the service sector in the early twentieth century.
This pattern, according to Goldin, is the outcome of structural change and changing social norms surrounding women’s roles at home and in the family.
Throughout the twentieth century, women’s education levels steadily increased, and in most high-income nations, they are now far higher than men’s.
Goldin argued that access to the contraceptive pill accelerated this revolutionary transition by providing fresh opportunities for career planning.
Despite modernization, economic progress, and increased proportions of employed women in the twentieth century, the pay gap between men and women remained wide for a long time.
Part of the explanation, according to Goldin, is that educational decisions, which affect a lifetime of employment options, are made at an early age.
If young women’s expectations are influenced by the experiences of past generations – for example, their moms who did not return to work until their children were grown – then development will be slow.
Historically, variations in education and career choices could explain a large portion of the female wage disparity.
However, Goldin has demonstrated that the majority of this wages disparity currently exists between and women in the same occupation, and that it is mostly caused by the birth of the first child.
As American historian Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, the grand prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor.
