Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday for her work in advancing awareness of the gender gap in the labor market.
The recognition also takes a small step toward closing the Nobel committee's own gender gap: Goldin is only the third woman to win the economics prize out of 93 winners.
Goldin's study of women's participation in the workforce over 200 years shows that despite continued economic growth, women's pay has not consistently caught up with men's, and even though women have achieved higher levels of education than men, the gap remains.
Jakob Svensson, chair of the Economics Prize Committee, said: "Understanding the role of women in the Labour market is very important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin's pioneering research, we now know more about the underlying factors and the barriers that may need to be addressed in the future."
Randi Hjalmarsson, an economist and member of the prize committee, said that Goldin did not propose solutions, but that her research allowed policymakers to address deep-rooted problems.
Photo: Nobel Prize official website
"She explains the roots of the gap and how it has changed over time and how it has changed with different stages of development," he said. "It's a complicated policy problem because if you don't know the root cause, a policy won't work," he said. By finally understanding the problem and justifying it, we will be able to pave a better path forward."
Cialmarsson also says that because systematic labor-market records don't exist for parts of history, and even if they do, information about women is missing, so Goldin had to become a data sleuthing to fill in the missing data for her research. She mines archives to find novel sources of data and uses them creatively to measure these unknowns.
According to Goldin's analysis, a woman's role in the job market and the compensation she receives are not only affected by broad social and economic changes. They also depend in part on individual women's decisions, such as how much education they get.
Young girls often refer to their mothers' involvement when deciding on future jobs, and each generation "learns from the successes and failures of the previous one," Ms. Cialmarsson said.
The process of assessing prospects as times change "helps explain why the gender gap in the labor market has been so slow to change," she said.
Goldin, 77, was "surprised and very happy" to win the Nobel Prize.
In an interview with the Harvard Gazette on Monday, Goldin said she, her husband and frequent collaborator Lawrence Katz, an economics professor, were napping at home when she got the call.
Reflecting on her work, she told the publication: "We have reached a stage where the employment rate of women is extremely high, but there are still inequalities. And those inequalities stem from inequalities that occur within families."
Goldin graduated from Cornell University in 1967 and earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago. She joined Harvard in 1990 and became the first woman to be tenured in the economics department. Her latest book, Career and Family: Women's Centennial Journey to Equality, will be published in 2021.
The economics prize was announced last week after the winners of the Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and Peace were announced.
The Economics Prize was established in 1968 by the Swedish Central Bank and is officially known as the Sveriges Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Of the 92 previous winners of the economics prize, only two have been women.