Claudia Goldin’s Nobel win acknowledges what we should all know: women’s economics is mainstream economics
Afew years ago I took a class on the most influential modern economists. It was at an Ivy League institution in the US and dozens of old, white men and their theories made the syllabus. Claudia Goldin was the only woman. On the slide accompanying the lecture in which she was featured, her name was misspelled.
On Monday, Goldin won the Nobel economics prize. After Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019, Goldin is only the third woman to win, and the first to be honoured solo.
Goldin’s work has been instrumental in our collective understanding of why gender gaps exist and how female labour force participation has ebbed and flowed over time, buffeted by social, cultural, political and economic factors. Her research, in many ways, formed the basis of my upcoming book, a narrative history of female economic empowerment since the second world war. Her credentials, even before this week, unequivocally qualify her as one of the pre-eminent economists alive today.
And yet still, in recent years, it feels like the topic of women in the economy has been sidelined, marginalised and relegated to the fringes of the field. One very obvious example is the unpaid labour market, which, globally, is overwhelmingly dominated by women – often doing care and domestic work – and is entirely unaccounted for in widely accepted standards and measures of economic activity, growth and productivity. An enormous sector, absolutely required for a functioning economy, is still totally invisible in our measurements and calculations.
Last week the consultancy McKinsey and the nonprofit LeanIn published their annual Women in the Workplace report, comprising research on 276 companies in the private, public and social sectors. It concludes that women are still systemically held back in the workplace because of a host of factors, ranging from inadequate childcare, expectations, norms, unconscious bias and outright discrimination.
In my own research I was shocked to find that business leaders – including the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest corporations – still place the onus on women to fix economic inequality between genders. Some are still convinced that the enduring gender pay gap is simply a function of women’s choice; a symptom of women just not being as professionally ambitious as their male counterparts.
Elsewhere, economics as presented in the media is still an almost entirely male-dominated domain, with men disproportionately cited and quoted in coverage. And, according to one extensive study, just 0.02% of news coverage globally focuses on seven substantive gaps between men and women, in pay, power, safety, authority, confidence, health and ageism. Every one of these gaps has economic implications.
However, it doesn’t get more prestigious or more mainstream than the Nobel. The work of the winners is designated as among the most consequential and relevant to the world in which we live. As such, I’m opti