The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the winner 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel which was awarded to American Economic Historian Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”
77 years old Claudia Goldin is an economic historian and labor economist who is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. According to the Academy, she uncovered key drivers of gender differences in the labour market.
“This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap,” stated the Academy.
With women being vastly underrepresented and underpaid in the global labour market, Goldin has researched the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.
The Academy opined, “Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.”
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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.
“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,” says Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
