Nobel for American Prof Claudia Goldin for study on workplace gender gap

Stockholm, October 9

The Nobel prize for economics was awarded on Monday to Harvard University Professor Claudia Goldin for research that has advanced the understanding of the gender gap in the labour market. The announcement went a tiny step to closing the Nobel committee’s own gender gap: Goldin is just the third woman to win the prize of the 93 economics laureates.

She has studied 200 years of women’s participation in the workplace, showing that despite continued economic growth, women’s pay did not continuously catch up with men’s and a divide still exists despite women gaining higher levels of education than men.

“I’ve always been an optimist. But when I look at the numbers, I think something has happened in America, that we, in the 1990s, our labour force participation rate for women was the highest in the world, and now it isn’t the highest in the world,” Goldin said.

“We have to step back and ask questions about piecing together the family, the home, together with the marketplace and employment,” she said.

Goldin’s research does not offer solutions, but it allows policymakers to tackle the entrenched problem, said economist Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the Nobel committee. — AP