ECONOMY
NOBEL PRIZE – AWARDS
News: 2023 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences awarded to U.S. economist Claudia Goldin for research on the workplace
gender gap
What's
in the news?
●
The “Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences”
has recently decided to give the Nobel Prize in Economy 2023 (Sveriges Riksbank
Prize in Economic Sciences) to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labour
economist and economic historian, for working on the “women’s labour market outcomes.”
Key
takeaways:
●
Only
two of the 92 economics laureates honoured have been women.
●
In Goldin’s analysis, a woman’s role in
the job market and the pay she receives aren’t influenced just by broad social
and economic changes. They also are determined partly by her individual
decisions about, for example, how much education to get.
Claudia
Goldin Research:
●
Claudia Goldin provided for the first time
a comprehensive account of women’s
earnings and their labour market participation since the centuries.
●
Although she accumulated the data from the
United States, her insights and
model reached across the world due to the findings of similar patterns in many
countries.
1.
Drivers in Women Labour Market:
●
She revealed the key drivers of the gender
gap in labour market and employment.
●
She presented new and surprising facts
that women’s choices have been limited
by marriage and domestic responsibility, family, etc.
2.
U-shaped Curve:
●
Goldin showed that female participation in
the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but
instead forms a U-shaped curve.
●
Goldin explained this pattern as the
result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s
responsibilities for home and family.
○
The participation of married ones has
decreased with the transition from
agrarian to industrial society due to the Industrial revolution in the 19th
century, but increased due to the growth
of the service sector in the early 20th century.
3.
Career Planning:
●
Goldin demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important
role by offering new opportunities for career planning.
●
According to Goldin, part of the
explanation is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career
opportunities, are made at a relatively young age. If the expectations of young
women are formed by the experiences of
previous generations – for instance, their mothers, who did not go back to
work until the children had grown up – then development will be slow.
4.
Gender Gap in Pay:
●
On the topic of the earnings gap between
men and women, data shows that despite modernisation, economic growth and
rising proportions of employed women in the 20th century, for a long period of
time the earnings gap hardly closed.
●
Historically, much of the gender gap in
earnings could be explained by differences in education and occupational
choices. However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is
now between men and women in the same occupation and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.