Nobel Prize awarded to gender pay gap economist

Tim Wallace
Mon, 9 October 2023

The Harvard professor found the main factor holding back women’s earnings was caring for children - HARVARD UNIVERSITY/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/Shutterstock

A Harvard professor who found the main factor holding back women’s earnings is caring for children has won the Nobel Prize for economics.

Claudia Goldin was awarded the prestigious prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday in recognition of work that has “advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.

Her four decades of studies have focused on how the role of women in the workforce has changed over time and what that has meant for their earning power.


Prof Goldin found fewer women worked outside the home after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but that more women began moving into paid employment through the 20th century as education improved and innovations such as the contraceptive pill allowed more control over family planning.

She has taken aim at the idea that sexist managers are responsible for much of the gender pay gap, instead finding it is largely caused by decisions made after having children.

Women typically take on the majority of caring responsibilities and so need flexible jobs – effectively locking themselves out of the higher-paid “greedy jobs” that require work late into the evenings, over weekends and while on holidays, she said.

“A greedy job is a job in which you’re supposed to respond late at night or on weekends or take off that vacation,” she told a recent International Monetary Fund podcast.

“And it takes up a lot of your life. And it’s a job for which if you couldn’t give it all of your life, then you wouldn’t be in the job for a long time. You wouldn’t be promoted.

“Not so many women are going into these greedy jobs, precisely because they can’t do those kind of hours because they have kids to take care of or somebody to take care of.”

Prof Goldin is the third woman to have been awarded the prestigious prize, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. The prize includes a payment of 11m Swedish krona (£820,000).

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: “By trawling through the archives and compiling and correcting historical data, Goldin has been able to present new and often surprising facts.

“She has also given us a deeper understanding of the factors that affect women’s opportunities in the labour market and how much their work has been in demand.

“The fact that women’s choices have often been, and remain, limited by marriage and responsibility for the home and family is at the heart of her analyses and explanatory models.”

Hans Ellegren, the academy’s secretary general, said the professor “was surprised and very, very happy” to be given the award.

The Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded annually since 1969 and there have been 93 recipients.