Economic historian and Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin is the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s outcomes in the labor market.” She is the third woman in 54 years to win this prestigious award.
Goldin’s work, as explained by members of the Nobel Foundation, consists not so much in suggesting appropriate policies to reduce the gender gap between men and women in the labor market, but rather in describing the phenomenon and trying to understand its causes.
Therefore, in a challenge of great magnitude, she has studied the participation of women over a period of 200 years, to see if she found any common pattern. “He played detective,” they say from Stockholm. She wanted to understand why, even though in many cases they were better educated than men, they had more difficulty getting jobs with salaries equal to theirs.
What is your conclusion? Claudia Goldin breaks a cliché that many take for granted: when there is economic growth, society and the economy also move towards gender parity in proportion. In reality, this academic has shown that this is not always the case, that the two factors are unrelated and that the progress of female participation in the world of work, as well as the reduction of wage discrimination, proceed rather in fits and starts, “in a sporadic” and discontinuous.
Claudia Goldin believes that the future of women’s work is essentially based on the decisions they make in their youth when it comes to training. And in most cases these decisions are conditioned by certain expectations. The latter, in turn, are influenced by the family models of preceding generations. So much of the woman’s advancement in her professional career would be conditioned in part by the expectations they have experienced at home, also in comparison with her mothers. Thus, the low expectations of young women would end up harming their future careers in the medium term.
In this sense, in one of her most famous articles, The power of the pill: Oral contraceptives and women’s career and marriage decisions (with Lawrence Katz), Goldin shows how the popularization of the contraceptive pill radically changed women’s decisions. women around education, career and marriage, since women who entered university after the appearance of the pill began to prioritize their professional career and delay marriage.
Furthermore, her research verifies how women’s aspirations have varied throughout the 20th century: at the beginning of the century they had to choose between work as a means of subsistence or family; Starting in the 1920s, they chose to put work first; In the 40s that relationship was reversed, and in the 60s the concept of career was introduced, which was placed before the family, until reaching the current moment, starting in the 80s when women want to combine career and family. .
The Nobel committee recalled that even in developed economies, wage differences average 13%, while participation in the labor market is 30% lower. According to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report 2023, at the current rate it will take 131 years to achieve labor parity between men and women.
Claudia Goldin, who was the first woman to obtain a permanent position in the Economics departments of the Universities of Pennsylvania, first, and Harvard, later, already won in 2019 with the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in Economics awarded each year by the BBVA Foundation. In an interview she gave then, she declared: “Salary inequality is nothing more than a reflection of the inequality of the couple. The amount of time that they dedicate to the home is disproportionate when compared to that which men dedicate to it. Yes If we want to reduce discrimination, we should start by involving men more in household chores so that they can have more time to dedicate to their professional projects. In many studies we do not see large salary differences when women do not have children, or do not assume the responsibility of taking care of household obligations.
In his opinion, “the fundamental change has to do with men more than with women. It is essential that men also assume the responsibility of being aware of what is happening in their homes, and are the first to tell their bosses that “They’re not willing to work overtime on Sunday and miss their daughter’s soccer game.”
The Nobel Prize in Economics is the only one of the six prizes not created by the Swedish magnate Alfred Nobel, but was established by the National Bank of Sweden (Riksbank) in 1968 and was awarded for the first time the following year. In the 54 occasions on which it has been awarded – it has never been void, unlike the other five – it has distinguished 92 people, only two of them women: the American Elinor Ostrom (2009) and the French Esther Duflo (2019). “We do not take gender into account when awarding the prize, we only look at the scientific contribution,” the Nobel committee stated yesterday.
The prizes will be awarded on December 10 in the traditional double ceremony: in Oslo, for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in Stockholm, for the remaining five prizes. As a curiosity, the committee has tried to contact the winner to inform her of the decision, but she did not get on the phone.
