Anne Boring reflects on 2023 Nobel Prize laureate Claudia Goldin

What makes Claudia Goldin’s work unique?

‘First and foremost, she is a pioneer among female economists. In 2006, she was for instance only the third woman to give the AEA Distinguished Lecture (at the time called the Richard T. Ely Lecture) at the American Economic Association annual meeting (after Joan Robinson in 1971 and Alice M. Rivlin in 1974). She is the first women to obtain tenure at Harvard’s Economics Department. And she is also only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. She won this prize for her work highlighting inequalities in wages and labour market participation between men and women.

Her historical approach provides us with an in-depth understanding of how these inequalities can change over time. For instance, in her 2006 lecture, The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family, she details four different phases that characterize women’s participation in the labour market, starting from the late nineteenth century. Her findings are a reference for researchers working on gender economics, a field of economics that has grown massively over the past decade. I think that this prize also rewards indirectly other pioneers in the field of gender economics, some of whom are also well-known, such as Marianne Bertrand, Francine Blau or Muriel Niederle.’          

Can you elaborate on the causes of change her research reveals, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap?

‘I think her research is important to understand how men and women’s preferences and the different constraints that they face guide their choices on the labour market. Her work is especially important to understand how these constraints can change over time, thus enabling women (and men) to make difference choices. For instance, she has shown how women’s labour force participation has increased drastically in the twentieth century in countries like the United States thanks to an increase in the supply of jobs available to women, new technologies that reduce time spent on housework, and families’ ability to outsource household production. Her work showing how the contraceptive pill reduced constraints on women, enabling them to invest in their education and careers, as well as to make different marriage decisions, provides us with a much better understanding of how labour market inequalities work and can be reduced. In her more recent work, such as A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter, she shows how working hours are one of the main factors that prevent the closing of the gender pay gap. She argues that firms tend to disproportionately reward workers who are able and willing to work in the evenings and during weekends—that is when women are more often taking care of children at home. This is true in many of the high-paying sectors, such as in finance, business consultancy, and law firms. ‘

How does Goldin’s groundbreaking research influence your professional research career?

‘In my research, I am interested in examining the impact of policies that are designed to reduce gender inequalities in the labour market. Her research is important to understand what some of the remaining obstacles are, and what types of policies could work to reduce inequalities.  I use her findings to gain a historical perspective on some of the main indicators of gender inequalities in the labour market, such as the gender pay gap, labour market participation, but also choices in higher education. Recently, I cited her work in a paper with Gloria Moroni, where we discuss how attitudes towards gender equality in the labour market can change when households cannot outsource household production. I also met her during my Research Fellowship at Harvard last year, and her insights were very useful to inform my more recent work about workplace culture. Finally, I discuss several of her groundbreaking papers in my Master-level course on Inequalities and Discrimination in the Labor Market.’