The American Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for the advances she made regarding the role of women in the labor market.
The Harvard professor, the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, was distinguished “for having contributed to the understanding of women’s performance in the labor market,” said the jury of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Claudia Goldin’s research has given us new and often surprising insights into the historical and contemporary role of women in the workplace,” the Swedish academy said.
Women are severely underrepresented in the global labor market and, when they work, they earn less than men, the Swedish academy recalled.
Goldin dug into the archives and compiled more than 200 years of data from the United States, “allowing her to show how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.”
The academy recalled that, “despite modernization, economic growth and the increase in the proportion of women employed in the 20th century, over a long period of time the wage gap between men and women barely decreased.”
According to the laureate, part of the explanation lies in the fact that educational decisions, which impact career opportunities throughout life, are made at a relatively early age.
“If the expectations of young women are determined by the experiences of previous generations (for example, their mothers, who only returned to work when their children were older), development will be slow,” he argues.
The Swedish academy recalls that, historically, much of the income difference between genders is explained by differences in education and professional choice.
“However, Goldin showed that most of this income difference currently occurs between women and women working in the same profession and that it arises largely with the birth of the first child,” he explains.
During the 20th century, women’s educational levels rose steadily.
“The revolutionary phase” of women in the labor market that is still “ongoing”
Nova SBE professor Susana Peralta knows the work of Claudia Goldin, a work that identifies a revolutionary phase for women in the economy.
“Claudia Goldin talks about an already revolutionary phase starting in the 70s, in which, basically, women began to gain a perspective on their career, in which, for example, their career is based on identity, that is, women also define “They focus on their career, they start getting married later. Claudia Goldin has, for example, important work on contraceptives, which brought this possibility for women to express themselves in society, in addition to the domestic economy and the care economy,” she says. A TSF Susana Peralta.
The professor affirms that, “as Claudia Goldin says, the revolution is still underway.” “The problem of gap The salary between women and men is an issue of this revolutionary phase, because before the issue was not raised, only when women begin to acquire this identity linked to their own career and obtain this level of qualification, which today is, on average, higher than that of men, that’s when the question begins,” he highlights.
Last year, the winners were Americans Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig “for their research on banks and financial crises.”
The Economics Prize was created in 1968 by the Central Bank of Sweden, is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and is the last known Nobel Prize, following the announcement of the winners at the Medicine categories. Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace.
This year’s winners receive an additional one million Swedish crowns, bringing the total amount received by the winners to 11 million Swedish crowns (around 925 thousand euros).
Winners will also receive an 18-karat gold medal and diploma at award ceremonies in December in Oslo and Stockholm.
*News updated at 12:13 pm
Source: TSF
