Claudia Goldin wins Nobel economics prize for work on gender gap – business live

Jason Furman, the former top economic adviser to President Obama, says Goldin’s success today is “fantastic”.

He also points us to his review of her book, Career and Family, which explained how the gender pay gap was due to institutional hurdles, rather than discrimination – and how having a child has a significant, negative impact on a woman’s earnings.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences do not, unfortunately, have Claudia Goldin on the phone to take questions from reporters – although they have said Goldin was ‘surprised and very, very glad’ to hear she had won.

One of the perils of holding the announcement around noon in Stockholm is that US-based economists tend to be asleep when the winning call comes.

This was a particular problem in 2019, when economist Robert Wilson, then 83, had to wake his colleague Paul Milgrom (then 72) to tell him they had won the prize for their work on auction theory.

Economist Randi Hjalmarsson adds that Goldin’s work has centred on the source of the gender pay gap, and how it has changed through history.

The source of the gender gap in wages, back in the industrialistion period, that was not due to discrimination, but the role of discrimination changed as we moved to offices.

She explains the source of the gap, and how it has changes over time, and changes with stages in development.

Claudia Goldin’s work has shown that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over a 200 year period.

Instread, it forms a U-shaped curve, with fewer women in employment as economies moved from agriculture in the industral revolution, but rose again as the service sector expanded.

The prize-awarding committee explain:

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.

Q: What recommendations does Claudia Goldin make to close gender gaps in the workplace?

Economist Randi Hjalmarsson explains that Goldin does not explicitly study policy, or proscribe solutions:

She has described the problem, or the gender gap. It’s not even clear that it is a problem without understanding why it exists.

She has demonstrated that the sources of the gender gap change over time, and understanding what is underlying it is the first step to understanding what one might want do to – if one wants to do anything at all – to affect it.

Hjalmarsson adds that Goldin’s work has provided an “underlying foundation”, which has different policy implications for different countries around the world.

You can’t treat an illness with a medication without knowing what it is, and what causes it.

Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, tells reporters in Stockholm that Claudia Goldin was “surprised and very, very glad” to get the call this morning that she had won.

Claudia Goldin has been recognised for her work collecting over 200 years of data from the US, which showed how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.

This work is very important, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences say, as women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour market and, when they work, they earn less than men.

Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, says:

“Understanding women’s role in the labour market is important for society.

Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future.

Claudia Goldin will receive 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1m, as the sole winner of this year’s prize.

Claudia Goldin wins Nobel prize in economics for research on women in the workplace