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“I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.
Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their drudgery was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. On America’s historical censuses, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.
The standard narrative of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.
Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of hard graft. Goldin argued that stigma reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy, indolent, and entirely negligent of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the clerical work of the 20th century was cushier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse.
Goldin appreciates the importance of social norms but emphasises how they can be supported or eroded by economic forces. In the 1930s American companies formalised policies of either firing or refusing to hire married women. “Men are too selfish and should have to support their wives,” explained one contemporary advocate. But such views were sustained by high unemployment. With the advent of tight labour markets in the 1950s, these discriminatory policies were virtually abandoned.
As well as the impact on women’s fortunes of changing supply and demand for their skills, Goldin explores the effects of technological progress. It wasn’t always good. The gender pay gap widened as America’s women moved away from piecework and towards office jobs where productivity was harder to monitor. The availability of the contraceptive pill in the 1970s was more positive. Along with Lawrence Katz of Harvard University, she showed how the lower risk of unplanned pregnancies allowed women to invest more in education and delay marriage. (As so many women did this at once, they could put off tying the knot without worrying that the most eligible bachelors would be snapped up.)
Expectations were crucial too, as women invested in their own education in the late 20th century in anticipation of higher returns. But Goldin argues that some cohorts made mistakes by basing their expectations on what they saw their mothers doing. Those born in the 1950s and 1960s decided how much to study before they saw their own mothers returning to paid work, and so they underinvested.
Today, women still work and earn less than men. In 2020 Goldin argued that the most recent wave of female discontent had focused on “bias, pay inequity, salary transparency and sexual harassment”. She is no stranger to the first. Along with Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University, she documented how the switch to blind auditions among orchestras in the 1970s and 1980s increased the share of women making it through.
But while she does not dispute that discrimination takes place, Goldin now doubts that its elimination would deliver very much. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, she says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are incompatible with being on call for children. Perhaps men should “lean out” and allow their partners to be consumed instead.
Before becoming the third woman to receive her profession’s highest accolade, Goldin was the first woman with tenure on Harvard’s economics faculty. But she is fundamentally a Chicago School economist, albeit one asking questions normally associated with the political left. Her acceptance on both sides is testament to years of careful research. And her celebration is long overdue.
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