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 (USA) “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”
Key findings of Claudia Goldin’s research
- It provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries.
- It reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
- It showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire 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. This pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.
- Access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by offering new opportunities for career planning.
- 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.
- The bulk of the earnings difference is now between men and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.
