Stockholm:The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”
2023 economic sciences laureate, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change and the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over a 200 year period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century.
Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.
During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men. Claudia Goldin – awarded the 2023 prize in economic sciences – demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by offering new opportunities for career planning.
Despite modernisation, economic growth and rising proportions of employed women in the twentieth century, for a long period of time the earnings gap between women and men hardly closed.
According to 2023 economic sciences laureate Claudia Goldin, part of the explanation is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age. If the expectations of young women are formed by the experiences of previous generations – for instance, their mothers, who did not go back to work until the children had grown up – then development will be slow.