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Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard university, has won the Nobel Prize for economics for advancing the understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.
The committee awarding the prize, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, said she had “provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market outcomes throughout the centuries”, revealing the main causes of change and the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
Goldin becomes only the third woman to win the prize, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
Randi Hjalmarsson, an expert on the prize committee, said Goldin had combined the tools of a labour market economist with those used by economic historians to chart how female employment in the US evolved over more than 200 years, in which a largely agricultural economy evolved into an industrial and then an office-based society.
“She had to be a detective,” Hjalmarsson said, describing how Goldin had uncovered and interpreted new sources of data for periods in which women’s occupations and earnings often went unrecorded, showing that their employment rate was much higher than shown in censuses.
One of her most counterintuitive findings was that women’s participation in paid employment did not increase steadily over time, or in line with economic growth, but formed a U-shaped curve.
Almost 60 per cent of married women were in work at the end of the 18th century — including those in agriculture, cottage industries and in the home — but this proportion dropped over the next century as industrialisation made it harder to combine work in factories with family duties.
Even in the 20th century, progress in closing the gender gap for employment and earnings was “slow and sporadic”, Goldin found.
Overt barriers, such as legislation that prevented women from remaining in jobs such as teachers or office workers when they married, played a part in this.
So did structural changes in the labour market. Pay discrimination against women increased in the early 20th century, Goldin found, as the growth of the service sector led employers to abandon piecework contracts in favour of monthly salary structures that tended to reward long service, uninterrupted by children.
But Goldin’s research also showed the persistent influence of educational choices women had made early in their lives — when they did not expect to spend long in the labour market — that limited their choices much later when they tried to return to work as their children reached independence.
Another key study she conducted showed how the introduction of the contraceptive pill at different times in different US states led women to plan and invest in their education and careers.
Although Goldin does not use her research as the basis for policy conclusions, the committee awarding the prize said it had had “vast societal implications” as “by finally understanding the problem . . . we will be able to pave a better way forward”.
Source: Economy - ft.com
