- By Lucy Hooker
- Business Reporter, ` News
October 9, 2023, 12:41 BST
Updated 44 minutes ago
image source, Harvard University
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Claudia Goldin, an American economic historian, for her work on women’s employment and pay.
According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Prof. Goldin’s research uncovered the main drivers of the gender pay gap.
She is only the third woman to receive the award and the first not to share the award with male colleagues.
The 77-year-old academic currently teaches labor market history at Harvard University in the USA.
She has “expanded our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, pointing to her work examining 200 years of data on the U.S. workforce and showing how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates exist changed over time.
“This year’s economics laureate, Claudia Goldin, has presented the first comprehensive report on women’s earnings and labor force participation over the centuries,” said a statement from the prize-giving body.
“Their research uncovers the causes of change as well as the root causes of the remaining gender gap.”
Their research found that married women began working less after the onset of industrialization in the 19th century, but their employment increased again in the 19th century as the service economy grew.
Higher levels of women’s education and the introduction of the birth control pill accelerated change, but the gender pay gap remained.
While in the past the income gap between men and women could be attributed to educational and career choices made at a young age, Prof Goldin found that the current income gap is now largely due to the impact of having children.
“Claudia Goldin’s discoveries have enormous societal impact,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the committee that awards the prize.
“It showed us that the nature of this problem, or the cause of this underlying gender gap, changes throughout history and over the course of development,” she said.
Prof Hjalmarsson described her as “a detective” and said her work had provided a foundation for policymakers in this area around the world.
Globally, about 50% of women participate in the workforce, compared to 80% of men, but women earn less and have fewer chances of reaching the top of the career ladder, the awards committee found.
In 1989, Prof. Goldin became the first woman to gain employment in the economics department at Harvard University. Economics still has an image problem among women, she told the ` in 2018.
“Even before students come to university, they believe that economics is a field more focused on finance and management and that women are less interested in it than men,” she said. If we explained that economics is about “inequality, health, household behavior, society,” then there would be a much greater balance, she said.
She also posts a blog about her dog Pika, a golden retriever, on her website.
The economics prize is different from the original prizes for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, which were established by Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901.
The Riksbank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences was established in 1968 and financed by the Central Bank of Sweden.
In 2019, Esther Duflo shared the award with her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their work focused on poor communities in India and Kenya.
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