STOCKHOLM:
Claudia Goldin, a professor from the US, became the third woman to win the economics Nobel Prize after being recognized for her work examining the causes of pay disparities between men and women.
According to a statement released on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Claudia Goldin will receive an award worth 11 million krona ($1 million).
According to Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, “understanding women’s role in the labor market is important for society.” We now know a lot more about the underlying causes and which restrictions may need to be removed in the future thanks to Claudia Goldin’s ground-breaking research.
Professor Claudia Goldin, who was born in New York in 1946, used more than 200 years’ worth of data to demonstrate that, while historically, pay gaps could be attributed to differences in educational attainment and career preferences, these gaps now primarily exist between men and women working in the same occupations and start to widen with the birth of a child.
Randi Hjalmarsson, an economics professor at the University of Gothenburg, said during a press conference following the announcement of the award that this understanding gives policymakers around the world a foundation to solve the issue.
Without knowing what a disease is and what causes it, you cannot cure it with drugs, she argued. She has offered an underlying framework with various policy ramifications in various international contexts and nations.
To show how the supply and demand for female labor have historically been influenced by their opportunities to combine paid work and a family, decisions about education and childrearing, technological innovations like the contraceptive pill, laws and norms, and the structural transformation of the economy, Goldin combined innovative methods in economic history with an economic approach.
She also disclosed “a startling new historical fact: women were more likely to participate in the labor force before the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century,” according to the academy. In comparison to life on the family farm, “industrialization made it harder for many married women to work from home and so combine work and family,” was one reason for this.
In a 2014 speech to the American Economic Association, Goldin said that if companies gave workers more freedom to choose the hours they worked, the pay gap between men and women might be narrowed. According to her, wage discrepancies are less pronounced in fields like technology and healthcare that allow for more flexible work hours.
Goldin is the third woman to get the economic sciences prize after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
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For their work on banking and financial crises, Ben Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig were awarded prizes the previous year. Previous honorees include Milton Friedman, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Robert J. Shiller.
In his testament, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish creator of dynamite, who passed away in 1896, established annual awards for accomplishments in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is an award in economic sciences that was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.