The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, sometimes referred to as the “Nobel of economics”, was awarded on Monday October 9 to the American Claudia Goldin, professor at Harvard University for her work on gender inequalities in the labor market. Her research focuses on topics such as the female workforce, income inequality, education, and gender pay inequality.

“She discovered the main factors explaining gender differences in the labor market,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “His research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the gap that remains between men and women. » Thus, “women are largely underrepresented in the global labor market and, when they work, they earn less than men.”

Birth of the first child

The winner demonstrated that women’s participation in the labor market has not experienced an upward trend over the past 200 years in the United States, but rather followed a U-shaped curve.

Throughout the twentieth century, women’s educational attainment has continued to rise, and in most high-income countries it is now significantly higher than that of men. Claudia Goldin demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating this change, by providing new career opportunities for women in terms of education and professional choices. Historically, much of the gender pay gap in the United States could be explained by differences in education and career choices. But according to his work, most of this difference in income today is between women and men exercising the same profession, and largely occurs at the birth of the first child.

Like the other Nobels, the prize is endowed with 10 million Swedish crowns (920,000 euros), to be shared among co-winners. Created by the Bank of Sweden, the economics prize “in memory of Alfred Nobel” was added in 1969 to the five traditional prizes (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace) more than sixty years after the others, he earning from his detractors the nickname “false Nobel”.

More information to come