The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2023

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12569

Scand. J. of Economics 126(3), 417–418, 2024

DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12569

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic

Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2023

Press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award

the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of

Alfred Nobel for 2023 to

Claudia Goldin, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

“for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour

market outcomes”.

She uncovered key drivers of gender differences in the labour market

This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided

the f‌irst comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market

participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change,

as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.

Women are vastly under-represented in the global labour market and, when

they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives

and collected over 200 years of data from the United States, allowing her to

demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment

rates have changed over time.

Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have

an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve.

The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an

agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started

to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century.

Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving

social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.

During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously

increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially

higher than for men. Goldin demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill

played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by offering

new opportunities for career planning.

Despite modernisation, economic growth, and rising proportions of

employed women in the twentieth century, for a long period of time the

earnings gap between women and men hardly closed. According to Goldin,

part of the explanation is that educational decisions, which have an impact

on a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age.

If the expectations of young women are formed by the experiences of previous

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or utgivande av the SJE.