This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences goes to the US economist Claudia Goldin. This concludes this year’s announcements of the Nobel Prize winners. The prizes will be awarded on the anniversary of the death of the prize founder Alfred Nobel on December 10th.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm awards the Nobel Prize in Economics to US economist Claudia Goldin. She teaches at Harvard University.
She is being honored for “uncovering the main causes of gender differences in the labor market,” as announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The 77-year-old receives the prestigious award for having improved the understanding of the role women play in the labor market, as the Academy’s Secretary General, Hans Ellegren, said when announcing the award. Goldin is only the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Caption: “Your research has given us new and often surprising insights into the historical and current role of women in the labor market,” the announcement continued. Keystone/Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency via AP
“By searching the archives and compiling and correcting historical data, Claudia Goldin has given us a deeper understanding of the factors that influence women’s opportunities in the labor market and the demand for their work,” writes the Nobel Prize Committee on X, formerly Twitter . “The fact that women’s choices have often been and remain limited by marriage and responsibility for home and family is the focus of their analyzes and explanatory models,” it said.
Wage differences arise when the first child is born
Goldin’s findings reached far beyond the borders of the USA and similar patterns were observed in many other countries. This year’s award winner’s research has shown that the majority of the wage differences between men and women in the same job arise with the birth of the first child.
The brief assessment by SRF business editor Sven Zaugg
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Without them, we would know much less about the position of women in the labor market today. Claudia Goldin, an economist at the renowned US elite Harvard University, has examined the participation of women in working life over the last 200 years.
And it has shown, based on reams of data, that despite continued economic growth, women’s wages have not caught up with men’s. For example, women have benefited less from industrialization than men, and marriage and having children have also excluded women from working life.
The contraceptive pill in the 1960s brought more self-determination for women and a higher work quota. But there is still an income gap, even though women today have a higher level of education than men globally. According to experts, Goldin’s work offers a basis for correcting the imbalance that exists between men and women economically and politically.
“Over the course of the 20th century, women’s educational levels rose steadily and are now significantly higher than those of men in most high-income countries,” according to the Academy of Sciences. Claudia Goldin showed that access to the birth control pill played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by opening up new opportunities for career planning.
Nobel Prize in Economics usually goes to US citizens
This concludes the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize winners. Last week, an Iranian women’s rights activist, a Norwegian author and a total of eight researchers from the fields of medicine, physics and chemistry were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Positive reactions from colleagues
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There was a lot of support from the experts for Goldin’s award. Isabel Martínez, an economist at the KOF economic research center at ETH Zurich, commented on the election that she made a significant contribution to making women visible in the labor market and in the economy. “Thanks, among other things, to Goldin’s work, economic actors also have a social gender, with all the characteristics that this entails.”
That may sound trivial today, but this differentiated perspective was necessary in order to be able to discuss and research gender differences, the consideration of family responsibilities or more flexible working conditions, Martínez continued.
“With her work, Goldin has significantly expanded our understanding of greater equality in the workplace,” said Achim Wambach, President of the Mannheim economic research institute ZEW. Expert Sascha Steffen from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management commented: “Their findings about the persistent gender pay gap are particularly noteworthy. Goldin’s contributions provide an important basis for policy decisions and future research.”
Last year, former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and fellow American economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig were honored. They received prestigious Nobel medals for their research into banks and financial crises.
In general, the Nobel Prize in economics often goes to winners who come from the USA or at least work there. This year’s Nobel Prizes are endowed with eleven million Swedish crowns per prize category (around 910,000 francs), which is one million crowns more than in previous years.
Actually not a real Nobel Prize
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The Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences is the only Nobel Prize that does not go back to the will of dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833 to 1896). It has been sponsored by the Swedish Reichsbank since the late 1960s and is therefore, strictly speaking, not one of the classic Nobel Prizes. Nevertheless, it will be ceremoniously presented together with the other Nobel Prizes.
More than 90 people have received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences since it was first awarded in 1969 – including only two women, Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Esther Duflo (2019).