This Monday, the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel 2022, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, to the American Claudia Goldin, professor at Harvard University (Massachusetts). The award, which makes Goldin the third woman to receive it after 55 editions – and the first to receive it alone – recognizes her studies on the underrepresentation of women and the lower salaries of female workers in the labor market.
“Despite modernization, economic growth and an increasing proportion of women in the 20th century, the wage gap between women and men has hardly narrowed for a long time,” emphasizes the academy in the judgment published at 12 p.m. “And she produced the first comprehensive report on women’s earnings and labor force participation over the centuries.”
Goldin (New York, 1946), a pioneer in gender gap analysis, holds a degree in economics from Cornell University, a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and spent time in Wisconsin, Princeton, Pennsylvania as part of her extensive teaching and research career and since 1990 Harvard. In addition, it has been part of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research for more than three decades.
Moment when Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was announced this Monday in Stockholm. CLAUDIO BRESCIANI (EFE)
“It is a very important award, not only for me, but for many people who are concerned with this issue. [la brecha de ingresos entre hombres y mujeres] and that they are trying to understand why great inequalities persist,” he explained in a telephone conversation with AFP hours later. Although he acknowledged “important developments,” there are “still major inequalities,” he said. She herself is a pioneer: she was the first woman to gain tenure in the economics departments of Harvard and Pennsylvania, both of the very prestigious American Ivy League.
The New York researcher has been one of the big favorites for the award for several years. In 2019, she won the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge (viewed by some as a prelude to the Nobel Prize in Economics) “for her innovative contributions to the historical analysis of the role of women in economics and for her analysis of the reasons for the gender gap”, both for educational reasons – which had always been mentioned until then – and for family reasons, such as the birth of the first child – which were far less present in the academic debate and which Goldin brought to the fore.
male presenteeism
“Men’s presenteeism has increased the wage gap compared to women,” he noted in an interview with EL PAÍS at the time. “Since the 1980s, for more than 30 years, women have not been doing badly, thanks to the improvement in their education, in which they even surpass the male sex. However, the number of men who work more hours and are available to the company at any time has increased. And that has resulted in the gap continuing to stagnate and no improvement being seen.”
Goldin also denies that the reason for the gender gap was solely discrimination: “There’s something else,” she said in that interview. According to their research, this scourge has increased significantly with the rise of administrative and service jobs, a niche of the labor market where bosses tend to highly value workers who have been in their jobs the longest and are not necessarily the most productive. “Men are disproportionately willing to work long hours at work, while women are disproportionately willing to devote themselves to housework.” This, he argued, “is the other side of the coin of marital inequality.”
The Harvard professor is a big advocate of equal paternity and maternity leave, as is the case in Spain. And that fathers take them just like their partners. “It is expected and assumed that women should take maternity leave, but the same is not expected of men. “This attitude needs to change so that people no longer think that a man who enjoys paternity leave is not a good employee,” Goldin said in 2019.
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In 1990, the Nobel laureate published Understanding the Gender Gap – An Economic History of American Women, an already iconic work in which she questioned many of the explanations for the wage gap between male and female workers. He concluded that the origin of discrimination lies largely in the promotion mechanisms and human resources management policies of institutions and companies, which have contributed to its persistence over the years.
“Although the book deals with the analysis of one country, the United States, its findings are applicable to other countries,” he said when receiving the Frontiers of Knowledge. “The key factors that have led to the narrowing of gender differences are related to what is happening in the environment of individuals, and not to the individuals themselves. It is primarily due to educational changes that have given women the necessary skills to the development of their professional career.”
Claudia Goldin after receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics this Monday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. BRIAN SNYDER (Portal)
As every year, this award – worth 11 million Swedish crowns (950,000 euros at the current exchange rate) – ends the round of the Nobel Prize ceremony. The award, like all others, will take place in a double ceremony on December 10th in Oslo (Nobel Peace Prize) and in Stockholm (all others).
On the trail of Ostrom and Duflo
Female names among the winners are an exception. Of the 93 researchers who have won the prize, only three are women: the American Elinor Ostrom (2009), the French Esther Duflo (2019, when she also became the youngest winner at the age of 46) and now Goldin.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is the only one of the six prizes that was not directly created by the Swedish tycoon Alfred Nobel. Unlike the others, it was created by the Swedish National Bank (Riksbank in Swedish) in 1968 and was first granted a year later. Furthermore, unlike the other five categories, it has not been abandoned in any of its editions.
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