Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor has won the Nobel economics prize for “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes” and for providing “the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labor market participation through the centuries”.
Goldin, 77, is the third woman to be awarded with the Nobel and she is the first woman to win the prize without sharing it with someone else. The award is worth 11 Swedish Kronor, about a million dollars.
In her work, she collected over 200 years of data from the U.S. and demonstrated that women are underrepresented in the labor market and how the gender gap changed over the years.
Women’s participation in the labor market did not have an upward trend, but had a U-shaped curve, where women participated more in an agrarian society and their participation in the market fell when the U.S. transitioned as an industrial society.
Goldin found that the contraceptive pill allowed women to participate more in the labor market. The pill allowed young women to better plan their future and to delay marriage and childbirth, which in the beginning of the 20th century stopped women from having a bigger participation in the labor market.
Women now have a higher level of education than men in the U.S., and they earn, on average, about 13% less than men. Goldin explained that the pay system rewards employees with long and interrupted careers. Once a woman has a child, the mother typically has more childcare responsibilities than men, and they are forced to focus more on their children, interrupting their career.
Goldin suggested to the Associated Press that help from their partners in childcare could lead to gender equality.
“Ways in which we can even things out or create more couple equity also leads to more gender equality,” she told the AP.
Goldin’s work helps to understand the societal causes of gender disparity in wages and labor market, and gives important insights for policymakers on how to minimize this disparity.
