Claudia Goldin wins the Nobel prize in economics

Her work has overturned assumptions about gender equality


her research provides a comprehensive history of gender labour-market inequality over the past 200 years. In telling this history, she has overturned a number of assumptions about both historical gender relations and what is required to achieve greater equality in the present day.


Before Ms Goldin’s work, economists had thought that economic growth led to a more level playing field.
The relationship between the size of Western economies and female-labour-force participation is U-shaped—a classic Goldin result.

Ms Goldin’s research has busted other myths, too. By employing time-use surveys and industrial data she has painstakingly filled in gaps in the historical record about women’s wages and employment.

Her calculations also showed that the gender wage gap narrowed in bursts. First, a drop from 1820 to 1850, then another from 1890 to 1930 and finally a collapse, from 40% in 1980 to 20% in 2005. What drove these bursts? The initial two came well before the equal-pay movement and were caused by changes in the labour market: first, during the Industrial Revolution; second, during a surge in white-collar employment for occupations like clerical work.

For the third and most substantial drop, in the late 20th century, Ms Goldin emphasised the role of expectations. If a young woman has more control over when and whether she will have a child, and more certainty about what types of jobs will be available, she can make more informed choices about the future and change her behaviour
detailed the example of the contraceptive pill,

Expectations also matter for employers.
Although the pay gap narrowed in the early 20th century, the portion of the gap that was driven by discrimination, rather than occupation

Wages used to be based on contracts tied to tangible output—how many clothes were knitted, for instance. But after industrialisation, they were increasingly paid on a periodic basis, in part because measuring an individual’s output became trickier. As a result, other more ambiguous factors grew in importance, such as expectations of how long a worker would stay on the job. This penalised women, who were expected to quit when they had children.

Ms Goldin blames “greedy” jobs, such as being a lawyer or consultant, which offer increasing returns to long (and uncertain) hours.

She explains how such work interacts with the so-called parenthood penalty.

Before Ms Goldin, many academics considered questions about historical gender pay gaps unanswerable owing to a paucity of data. She has demonstrated—again and again—that digging through historical archives allows researchers to credibly answer big questions previously thought beyond their reach.

In early 20th-century America, firms barred married women from obtaining or retaining employment. A policy response came with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned such behaviour. Today, wage gaps persist because of greedy jobs and parental norms, rather than because of employer discrimination.

In the past, Ms Goldin has suggested more flexibility in the workplace could be a solution.