Nobel Prize winner in economics helped to understand the role of women in the labor market

This year’s award went to American Claudia Goldin.

Nobel Week 2023 ended on Monday, October 11, after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The winner was Claudia Goldin of Harvard University “for advancing our understanding of women’s performance in the labor market.”

This year’s economics laureate, Claudia Goldin, presented the first comprehensive report on women’s earnings and labor market participation over the centuries. Her research reveals the reasons for change, as well as the main sources of the persistent gender gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a decision.

Women are significantly underrepresented in the global labor market, and when they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin studied archives and collected data over more than 200 years in the United States, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in income and employment rates have changed over time.

Goldin showed that women’s labor force participation did not trend upward throughout this period, but instead formed a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women declined with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then began to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as a result of structural changes and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities in the home and family.

Women’s educational attainment has steadily increased over the course of the twentieth century, and in most high-income countries it is now significantly higher than that of men. Goldin demonstrated that access to birth control pills played an important role in accelerating these revolutionary changes by offering new opportunities for career planning.

Despite modernization, economic growth, and an increase in the share of women in employment in the twentieth century, the income gap between women and men has remained virtually unchanged for a long period of time. According to Claudia Goldin, this is partly because educational decisions that affect career opportunities throughout life are made at a relatively young age. If young women’s expectations are shaped by the experiences of previous generations—for example, their mothers who did not return to work until their children were grown—then development will be slow.

Historically, much of the gender income gap could be explained by differences in education and occupational choice. However, Claudia Goldin has shown that the bulk of this income gap now occurs between men and women in the same occupation, and that it largely begins with the birth of the first child.

“Understanding the role of women in the world of work is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s pioneering research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and what barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” says Jakob Svensson, Chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.

In total, from 1969 to 2022, the award was made 54 times, and 92 people became laureates of the economics prize. Moreover, in 20 cases the prize was divided between two recipients. And in nine cases the reward was divided into three. Last year, American scientists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig received an economics award “for their research on banks and financial crises.”

Among our compatriots, the economic Nobel laureate in 1973 was the creator of the theory of intersectoral analysis, an American economist of Russian origin, a graduate of Leningrad University, Vasily Leontiev. And in 1975, a prize for “contribution to the theory of optimal resource allocation” was awarded to the Soviet scientist Leonid Kantorovich.

Until this year, only two women were awarded the Nobel in the field of economics – Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Esther Duflo (she was also the youngest awarded in the field of economics in 2019 – at that time she was 46 years old). The oldest laureate is considered to be 90-year-old American economist and Moscow native Leonid Gurvich, who received the award in 2007.

The Nobel Prize in Economics occupies a special place among other awards, since it did not originate by order of Alfred Nobel himself, but was established only in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden in honor of its 300th anniversary and in memory of the Swedish industrialist. That is why it is officially called the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Some members of the Nobel family even spoke out against the existence of such a “non-native” award. And critics generally dubbed it a “false Nobel Prize.” But the “secondary nature” did not prevent it from fitting quite adequately into the “Nobel context.” In particular, the award ceremony of this prize is broadcast live on the official website of the Nobel Foundation.