by Claudia Goldin — gender gaps and inequality The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s 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”. Indeed, Claudia’s contributions to the topic are vast, perhaps best epitomised by her 1990 book Understanding the Gender Gap. This book illustrates at once her rigor as a University of Chicago-trained PhD as well as her own determination to use the tools of economics to understand a topic that the (mostly) men of her cohort had overlooked. She once joked to us that while writing the book she had Gary Becker whispering in one ear to place gender gaps in the context of price theory and Dick Easterlin
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics
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Claudia Goldin — gender gaps and inequality
The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s 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”. Indeed, Claudia’s contributions to the topic are vast, perhaps best epitomised by her 1990 book Understanding the Gender Gap.
This book illustrates at once her rigor as a University of Chicago-trained PhD as well as her own determination to use the tools of economics to understand a topic that the (mostly) men of her cohort had overlooked. She once joked to us that while writing the book she had Gary Becker whispering in one ear to place gender gaps in the context of price theory and Dick Easterlin whispering in the other ear to take painstaking care with the data collection and analysis …Of course, Claudia’s experience as an economic historian taught her that the real world does not function as smoothly as economic models assume. So alongside supply and demand, she emphasised the centrality of institutions (laws, customs, etc.) in shaping the wage and employment levels that we ultimately observe.One pithy way in which Claudia used to explain the evolution in demand for women’s labour is that “women have a comparative advantage over men in ‘brain’ work and men have a comparative advantage in ‘brawn’”. As the economy shifted from agricultural and manufacturing to services, the relative demand for women’s work increased …
Claudia’s work analysing the ‘skill premium’ (the additional earnings gained by more educated workers) uses the same framework and, in our view, is just as influential and important as her work on gender gaps. Claudia’s 2008 book with Larry Katz – The Race Between Education and Technology – provides a unifying framework for understanding the rise and fall and then rise again of income inequality over the twentieth century.
