Why Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize in Economics is a milestone for gender equity

In an astonishing act of timing, Harvard University’s professor Claudia Goldin published a paper on Monday titled Why Women Won. It mapped milestone moments in women’s rights in the United States from 1905 to 2023.

A few hours later, she was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.

Goldin became only the third woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and the first to win it in her own right, not sharing it with a man.

For countless women in economics, and for advocates of gender equality more broadly, her recognition adds to the milestone moments she has documented in her own work.

Source: The Conversation

Decades of research have seen Goldin methodically collate data and archival stories, detective style, to uncover explanations for the rise and fall (and rise again) of women’s paid employment over the centuries, including:

• the empowering effect of the contraceptive pill
• the removal of legal restrictions on the employment of married women
• the influx of women into higher education
• the shift towards a services economy.