How the other half works: Claudia Goldin's contributions to our understanding of women's labour market outcomes

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Heather Sarsons
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12570

Scand. J. of Economics 126(3), 419–439, 2024

DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12570

How the other half works: Claudia Goldin’s

contributions to our understanding of

women’s labour market outcomes

Heather Sarsons∗

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1L4, Canada

heather.sarsons@ubc.ca

Abstract

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in

Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our

understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. This paper surveys Goldin’s contributions,

analysing women’s labour force participation from the late 1700s through to the present.

To document women’s participation in the workforce, Goldin uncovered rich data from varied

sources, from government reports and city directories to health surveys and university registration

cards. She combined these data with economic theory to identify the factors affecting women’s

employment and to explore how we might achieve gender equity today. Her work has had an

immense inf‌luence on how we understand the labour market, household decision-making, and

gender inequality.

Keywords: Gender; labour; history; female labour force participation

JEL classif‌ication:J12; J16; J21

1. Introduction

Claudia Goldin was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic

Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for “having advanced our understanding

of women’s labour market outcomes”. Goldin’s work documents how

women’s labour force participation in the United States has changed over

the past two centuries, and identif‌ies the driving forces behind the changes.

To date, Goldin has published dozens of academic papers on gender and

the labour market. On their own, each provides a snapshot of the economic,

social, and political conditions women faced at a given point in time, and

how those conditions inf‌luenced women’s role in the workforce. Together,

they illustrate how the interaction among technological progress, institutional

and economic changes, and gender norms advanced or hindered women’s

participation in the labour market.1

∗Also aff‌iliated with NBER.

1Goldin has written several articles that eloquently summarize her work and what it means for

women’s labour market outcomes today. See, for example, Goldin (2014a).

c

2024 The Authors. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of F¨

oreningen

f¨

or utgivande av the SJE.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License,

which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial

and no modif‌ications or adaptations are made.

420 The Nobel memorial prize for Claudia Goldin

This paper provides an overview of Goldin’s research. Her work is f‌irmly

rooted in economic theory, but challenges the notion that women’s labour

force participation was governed solely by market fundamentals. For example,

Goldin shows how stigma facing both women and men dampened the impact of

economic growth on women’s labour supply. She established that employers’

expectations regarding women’s labour force attachment played an ongoing

role in determining women’s wages. In addition, women’s own expectations

regarding their ability to have a career and family led to rapid changes in

labour force participation and occupation choices. Goldin’s work documents

the educational and technological advances that affected women’s beliefs and

aspirations.2

I begin with Goldin’s early research describing women’s work from the

late 18th century, a period when female labour force participation had been

thought to be low. Given this belief, and the dearth of data on women’s

work, little research had been conducted to understand women’s involvement

in the economy.3Goldin examined how census survey questions regarding

employment were asked at the time and found that they inaccurately measured

women’s work. Using city and business directories, Goldin discovered

hidden market work being done by women and estimated female labour

force participation to be much higher than previously thought. Goldin then

sought out newer and richer data sources to further understand women’s work

lives. For example, she used government reports, originally commissioned

out of the government’s concern about women working, to document the

occupations and industries that women worked in, as well as their pay. She

documents a U-shaped pattern in women’s labour force participation over

time. In the 1800s, women worked in agriculture, home trades, and even

manufacturing. Most of these jobs allowed them to balance home production

and childcare with paid work. Starting in the late 1800s, though, women’s

labour force participation began to fall as manufacturing, and the stigma

surrounding women in manufacturing, became widespread.

Section 3turns to the upward portion of the “U”: the gradual rise in female

labour force participation that began in the 1920s and 1930s. It reviews

Goldin’s research pointing to the importance of “clean” jobs in overcoming

the stigma associated with women working. Without stigma, the f‌inancial

gains that the household enjoyed made it attractive for women to work for

2Goldin was also one of the f‌irst economists to consider the labour supply of both single and

married women. Her work built on that of Jacob Mincer, who took seriously that married women

do not simply choose between work and leisure, but among work at home, work outside the

home, and leisure (Mincer, 1962).

3Between 1970 and 1985, only 38 papers in the American Economic Review, a leading economics

journal, contained the words “women”, “female”, or “gender” in the title or abstract, and many

of these were not actually related to women’s labour force participation.

c

2024 The Authors. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of F¨

oreningen

f¨

or utgivande av the SJE.