The 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences — the ‘economics Nobel’ — has been awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”
Goldin brought history to bear on this question through rigorous forensic analysis of how changes in women’s participation in the labour force have been influenced by social, political and technological change over the past two centuries. More growth; low pay Before Goldin’s studies, it was widely thought that the increase in the proportion of women in work over the course of the twentieth century was a reflection of economic growth — higher growth meant more women in employment. But by looking back carefully at older historical records, Goldin showed that the proportion of married women involved in paid work was at least as high in the late eighteenth century, when economic growth rates were much lower, as it is today.
Goldin explained this shortfall as being down to expectations. Influenced by what they saw in their parents’ generation, young women tended to make educational choices that did not reflect an expectation of future career prospects. Only by the 1970s did women anticipate how much they might be able to work and invest their efforts accordingly.