On the evening of October 9th, Beijing time, the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics was announced. Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, received this award in recognition of her research that advances the understanding of women’s labor market outcomes. She reveals the main drivers of gender differences in the labor market.
Goldin was born in New York, USA, in 1946. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA in 1972. She successively served as an assistant professor at Princeton University, associate professor and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, she joined Harvard University and became the first tenured professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
Goldin provides the first comprehensive look at women's earnings and labor market participation over the centuries. Her research reveals the reasons for these changes, as well as the main sources of the gender gap that still exists in the labor market.
Women are severely underrepresented in the global labor market, and when women work, they earn less than men. Goldin collected archival data from the United States spanning more than 200 years to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.
Golding shows that throughout more than 200 years, women's participation in the labor market did not rise, but formed a U-shaped curve. In the early 19th century, with the transformation from agricultural society to industrial society, the labor market participation rate of married women declined. However, with the development of the service industry in the early 20th century, the labor market participation rate of married women began to increase. Goldin analyzed that this pattern is due to structural changes and the evolution of social norms about women's family responsibilities.
Golding found that over the 20th century, women's educational levels continued to improve, and in most high-income countries women's educational levels are now substantially higher than those of men. Golding demonstrates that the use of birth control pills played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change, opening up new opportunities for career planning.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences dates back to 1968. The Swedish Central Bank (SverigesRiksbank) established the Economics Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prize. From 1969 to 2022, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded 54 times, with 92 winners. Although the Nobel Prize in Economics is not a Nobel Prize in the traditional sense, since its establishment, it has been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same principles as the Nobel Prize since 1901.