Nobel given to gender pay expert
Goldin becomes first woman to win solo prize in economics
STOCKHOLM — Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University professor, was awarded the Nobel economics prize on Monday for research that helps explain why women around the world are less likely than men to work and are likely to earn less money when they do.
Out of 93 economics winners, Goldin is just the third woman to be awarded the prize and the first woman to be the sole winner in any year.
Only about half the world’s women have paid jobs, in contrast to 80% of men. Economists regard the gap as a wasted opportunity if jobs fail to go to the most qualified people because women either weren’t competing for work or weren’t being properly considered.
In addition, they say a persistent pay gap — women in advanced economies earn, on average, about 13% less than men — discourages women from pursuing jobs or continuing their education to qualify for more advanced job opportunities.
Goldin, 77, explored the reasons behind such disparities. Often, she found, they resulted from decisions that women made about their prospects in the job market and about their families’ personal circumstances. Some women underestimated their employment opportunities. Others felt overwhelmed by responsibilities at home.
To understand what was happening, Goldin pored through 200 years of labor market data. The task required a laborious process of sleuthing: Women’s jobs frequently didn’t appear in historical records. Women who worked on farms alongside their husbands or who labored at home in cottage industries such as weaving, for example, often went uncounted.
Goldin compiled new databases using such resources as industrial statistics and historical surveys on how people used their time. She discovered that official records dramatically undercounted how much work women were doing.
Correcting the record revealed some striking surprises. During the Industrial Revolution, as the U.S. and European economies rapidly expanded and shifted from farms to factories, women’s share of the workforce actually declined. Before Goldin’s work advanced public understanding, researchers, unfamiliar with older data, generally assumed that growing economies drew more women into the job market.
Progress in expanding female employment was slowed, in part, by women’s own expectations and the experiences they had witnessed. Often, for example, they watched their own mothers stay home even after their children had grown up.
But their expectations could be “severely off the mark,” and they led some women to cut short their education because they didn’t expect long careers, the Nobel committee said in an essay on Goldin’s work. Many women who came of age in the 1950s, for instance, did not foresee the growing opportunities of the 1960s and 1970s. Women who grew up later did, and more of them pursued higher education.
Goldin also discovered that marriage proved to be a more serious barrier to women’s employment than had been previously thought. At the start of the 20th century, only 5% of married women worked, versus 20% of all women. Until the 1930s, laws often barred married women from continuing their employment as teachers or office workers.
The earnings disparity between men and women narrowed as more women went to work. But it didn’t go away.
Goldin compiled two centuries of data on gender pay disparity. She found that the earnings gap narrowed during the first half of the 19th century and then from roughly 1890 to 1930 as companies began to need many more administrative and clerical workers.
But progress in reducing the pay gap stalled from about 1930 to 1980 even though more women were working and attending college.
Goldin identified the key cause: Parenthood. Once a woman has a child, her pay tends to drop and subsequently doesn’t grow as fast as it does for men, even among women and men with similar educational and professional backgrounds.
Modern pay systems tend to reward employees with long, uninterrupted careers. And companies often demand that employees be available at all times and flexible about working late and on weekends. That can be difficult for women, who typically bear more childcare responsibilities than men do.
Speaking to The Associated Press, Goldin expressed dismay that women are less likely to work in America than in France, Canada or Japan — a reversal from the 1990s, when U.S. women enjoyed the world’s highest labor force participation rates.
“When I look at the numbers, I think something has happened in America,” she said. “We have to ask why that’s the case … We have to step back and ask questions about piecing together the family, the home, together with the marketplace and employment.”