Breaking Barriers and Bridging Gaps: Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize in Economics

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Havard Professor Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes”. For the first time, this prize has been awarded to a woman alone (the Nobel Prize in Economics has gone to a group of researchers that included women twice before). University of Groningen economics professors Viola Angelini, Jutta Bolt, Kristina Czura, Noémi Péter and Agnieszka Postepska are happy to see Goldin as this year’s economic sciences laureate and want to further emphasize the impact of her research. The prize is not awarded for one paper or model but rather recognizes a large body of work, making it difficult to do justice to the depth and breadth of Goldin’s contributions, they state.

Claudia Goldin’s work has shaped the economic profession: much of the current research on labor economics, and gender bias and discrimination in general is influenced by her work. While before her, women were seen as side players, she brought women’s careers and roles in the economy to the center of the scene. Even today, women earn 13% less than men on average. Using historical data, Goldin has shed light on the factors that contribute to the gender wage gap and has shown that they have evolved over time. While historically, differences in earnings could be attributed to differences in educational and occupational choices, today earnings differences persist even between men and women in the same occupation. Goldin’s work has shown that a large share of these earning differences occurs at the time when the first child arrives, helping to uncover a driver of the gender pay gap: the motherhood penalty. Highlighting the importance of fertility choices to women’s careers, Goldin has also shown that the availability of the birth control pill had a significant and positive impact on women's educational and career choices. Her research suggests that the pill gave women more control over their reproductive choices, allowing them to delay marriage and motherhood, pursue higher education, and invest in their careers.

The importance of history

Groundbreaking in Goldin’s work is that she studies the evolution of women’s participation over the very long run. As comprehensive labor market records for earlier periods were scarce and data concerning women often absent, Goldin, like all economic historians, collected archival information in order to create her own long-term series on the gender gap. This allowed her not only to quantify the changes and persistence in the gender gap over the past 200 years, but also how various factors, such as changes in education, legislation, and societal norms, have affected labor market outcomes for women. Comparing different time periods helped her to identify the impact of specific policies or cultural shifts. This historical perspective also provides the context for interpreting current gender disparities accurately. By looking at historical data and trends, Goldin can contextualize contemporary issues and challenge misconceptions about gender and work.

Further, this long-run analysis enables Goldin to offer insights into the effectiveness of policies aimed at reducing gender disparities in the labor market. By studying how past policies have succeeded or failed, she can provide evidence-based recommendations for current policy initiatives. Finally, many gender-related labor market disparities are not a new phenomenon. By delving into historical data, Goldin sheds light on why certain gender gaps have been resistant to change and what it might take to address them effectively.

Greedy work and the gender wage gap

Understanding and addressing the gender wage gap is essential not only for achieving greater economic equality but also for economic progress more generally. In her articles and her recent book Career & Family, Goldin shows that many jobs are “greedy”, paying disproportionally more for long and demanding hours. When a child enters the picture, couple equity becomes very expensive, and parents are often confronted with the choice of who will be on call at home and who will be on call at work. Gender norms are such that the woman will be more likely to be the one who sacrifices her career for her family. “Men are able to have a family and step up because women step back from their career to provide more time for family. Both are deprived: men forego time with family; women forego career”, says Goldin in her book. If jobs are greedy, policies against discrimination and unconscious bias training will not be enough to close the gender wage gap. The solution is far more radical and implies a change in how work and care are structured, which currently remains rooted in a past when only men had careers. The path forward involves enhancing the productivity of flexible job arrangements, reducing the prominence of “greedy jobs” that demand 24/7 availability, for example by encouraging shared responsibilities, and making childcare more affordable.

In times in which gender equality and work pressure in academia are important topics of discussion, Goldin’s work provides food for thought for universities as well. The “work-from-home experiment” initiated by the pandemic and the innovation it forced onto the labor market regarding the facilitation of hybrid work create a natural experiment setting to test this very hypothesis. Dr. Agnieszka Postepska was recently awarded a grant from NWO to investigate whether any positive effects can already be observed in the Dutch labor market. 

Women in economics

Goldin’s work extends beyond her outstanding scientific contributions. Recognizing the severe underrepresentation of female students, she started the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge (UWE) in 2015 and funded policy interventions to encourage more undergraduate women to pursue a major in economics.

Goldin made history twice: She was the first woman to obtain tenure at Harvard University and also the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize alone. She is only the third woman out of 93 laureates in economics to receive this prestigious prize, with Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Esther Duflo (2019) being the first two. There are notable parallels between this fact and the message embedded in Goldin's body of work. While previous research did not fully recognize the importance of women’s labour to the economy, Goldin's work brought women's careers and their significant role in the economy to the forefront. There is a parallel here to the field of economics in that women’s contributions to the discipline have also been underappreciated (see for example work by Koffi (2021) on the under-citation of women, and Sarsons et. al (2021) on undervaluation of coauthored work). The Nobel Prize to Goldin sends a welcoming signal to women in the profession, implying that their efforts can receive the recognition they rightfully deserve. We sure hope that many more steps will follow in this direction.