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In 2023, she is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Her lifetime efforts in analysing the work environment help us understand the current phenomena of gender discrimination in workplaces.
Why do women work less than men?
Why do women, for equal positions, earn less than their male colleagues?
Why do working moms make less money than female colleagues without children?
These questions have found an answer thanks to the Economist and researcher Claudia Golden. The Harvard professor has dedicated her life to understand what moves and influences the work environment for women. For her commitment and efforts, she obtained the Nobel Prize on the date 9 October 2023. She is the third woman to achieve it, but the first one without mentioning a male colleague.
Her historical studies on female employment have revealed useful insights: for example, female employment was not incremental throughout history. This theory could be represented in a U-shape from the 1700s to the present. It shows, for instance, that employment among married women decreased in the 1800s, as the economy moved away from agriculture and toward industry and increased again at the beginning of the XX century with the expansion of the service economy. The increment is steady due to the higher educational level and the invention of the contraceptive pill, which gives women the possibility of birth control.
Her research has explained to us the reason behind the current situation of gender differences in the workplace. According to Claudia Goldin, the disparity of salary earnings between female and male colleagues was determined by the choices made by the woman in her youth regarding education and family life. Now, the difference in paychecks is between the men and women with the same job and they become relevantly big after the birth of the first child.
The discoveries conducted by Goldin are mostly useful for building a base on which to start reasoning on our conditions regarding earnings and disparity and also find ways to tackle these persisting inequalities thanks to the e new sources identified. Nevertheless, it reveals some elements that actively conditionate women's choices not only in the last decades but throughout history. Her samples are composed of female US citizens. They demonstrate that women are often conditioned by family models and their own mothers and grandmothers, even if they have lived in different times with different social and cultural references.
After being the first woman in the Economics department at Harvard, Claudia Goldin today marks an important achievement for her career and for ours.
References
The Prize in Economic Sciences 2023 - Press release - NobelPrize.org. (2023, October 9). Nobel Prize. Retrieved October 18, 2023, from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/press-release/ Smialek, J. (2023, October 11). Claudia Goldin Wins Nobel in Economics for Studying Women in the Work Force. The New York Times. Retrieved October 18, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/economy/claudia-goldin-nobel-prize-economics.html Untitled. (n.d.). Scholars at Harvard. Retrieved October 18, 2023, from https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/the_u-shaped_female_labor_force_function_in_economic_development_and_economic_history.pdf
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