Topics: Economics, Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize
Prize announcement. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 9 Oct 2023. < https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/prize-announcement/ >
9 October 2023
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 to
Claudia Goldin
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
“for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes”
She uncovered key drivers of gender differences in the labor market
This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labor market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labor market, and when they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.
Goldin showed that female participation in the labor market did not have an upward trend over this entire period but instead formed 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.
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