A Nobel for history and especially for an economic historian. Claudia Goldin – the first woman to secure a permanent contract in the economics departments of the US universities of Pennsylvania, first, and then Harvard – has won the highest award given by the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel for his investigations “worthy of a detective” on the evolution of women in the labor market throughout the last 200 years. She is the third woman in 54 years to win this prestigious award.
Goldin’s work, as explained by members of the Nobel Foundation, is not so much about suggesting appropriate policies to reduce the gender gap between men and women in the labor market, as describing the phenomenon and trying to understand its causes .
What is your conclusion? Claudia Goldin breaks a cliché that many take for granted: that when there is economic growth, society and the economy move towards gender parity. In reality, this academic has shown that this is not always the case and that the progress of women’s participation in the world of work, as well as the reduction of wage discrimination, take place rather in spurts, “sporadically” and discontinuously.
As explained yesterday by the Nobel committee, one of the most important determinants in the professional career of women is based on the decisions they make in their youth when it comes to training, because they are influenced by family models of previous generations, also compared to their mothers. If their expectations in youth are low, they end up harming their future career in the medium term. Antonio Ciccone, a professor at the German University of Manheim, was part of the jury that awarded Goldin the Frontiers of Knowledge in Economics prize from the BBVA Foundation in 2019. It highlights three main lines of research for the new Nobel. Goldin has shown that, when society was agricultural, a century ago, women participated heavily in the labor market, for example looking after animals on a farm. But with the arrival of industrial society, assembly lines and more physical work, they retreated to the home. Finally, with the development of the service society, its role in the economy increased again, so its trajectory in the labor market has rather followed the shape of a U.
Another of his experiments is that of the orchestra. “It showed that when signing musicians, the simple fact of doing blind auditions (listening to the musical test behind a curtain) substantially increased the presence of women,” explains Ciccone.
But the article that gave him notoriety was The power of the pill: oral contraceptives and women’s career and marriage decisions (with Lawrence Katz). Here Goldin shows how the popularization of the birth control pill radically changed women’s decisions about education, career, and marriage, as women who entered college after the birth of the pill began to prioritizing the professional career and delaying marriage.
“In many studies we don’t see big wage differences when women don’t have children, or don’t take on the responsibility of taking care of household duties,” explained Goldin, who opposes the establishment of female quotas.
In his opinion, “the fundamental change has to do with men more than with women. It is essential that they also assume the responsibility of being aware of what is happening at home, and be the first to tell their bosses that they are not prepared to work extra hours on Sunday and miss their daughter’s soccer game.”
