Economists are heralding their colleague Claudia Goldin\u2019s Nobel Prize win, but everyday women \u2014 and men \u2014 have plenty of reasons to celebrate the historian of women in the workplace.<\/p>\n
Goldin, a Harvard University economics professor, was the first solo woman to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences and the third woman to win the honor in its 55-year history. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said Goldin had \u201cuncovered key drivers of gender differences in the labour market.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But economists told MarketWatch that Goldin\u2019s impact reaches far beyond academia, and encompasses more than women\u2019s working lives. Her research, they said, has led to a better understanding of the forces that help women advance in their careers or hold them back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see ripples of her impact through lots of different fields across labor, economics, across education nationally,\u201d said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center of Law and Economics, a nonprofit and nonpartisan global research and policy think tank based in Portland, Ore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Goldin has been a \u201ctrailblazer\u201d and \u201coriginator\u201d in the study of women in the workforce, economists said. Her body of research spans more than 40 years and documents how factors such as family obligations and discrimination have affected the working lives <\/strong>\u2014 and, notably, the pay \u2014 <\/strong>of women in the U.S. since the 19th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her more notable findings have included uncovering the link between women\u2019s access to birth-control pills and their expanded career and educational choices. More women entered fields such as economics, law and medicine after oral contraceptives became widely available in the late 1960s, Goldin and her co-author Lawrence Katz found.\u00a0<\/p>\n Goldin\u2019s work has also documented how gender-related household obligations such as motherhood and caregiving impact women\u2019s career advancement and wages, and help fuel the persistent pay gap between men and women. On average, women in the U.S. currently earn about 82% of what men do, according to the Pew Research Center.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it weren\u2019t for Claudia, we (women) would not know our economic roots, where we came from, and where we are going,\u201d Misty Heggeness, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Kansas and author of the forthcoming \u201cSwiftynomics: Women in Today\u2019s Economy,\u201d told MarketWatch in an email.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cShe has done for the field of gender and the economy what the Beatles did for pop music,\u201d Heggeness said. \u201cAnd her influence isn\u2019t only felt among women.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Goldin\u2019s time, male labor economists usually excluded women in their analysis of the labor market, because women\u2019s choices were \u201ctoo complicated\u201d to be put into economic models, she added. Goldin was one of the first to include women, and took the time to \u201cdisentangle the trends and the behaviors of women,\u201d Heggeness said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though Goldin has focused on women, her research has enabled a more comprehensive view of the labor market, Heggeness said. For example, as men\u2019s educational attainment has slipped and they\u2019ve lost manufacturing jobs over the past few decades, Goldin\u2019s research on women has helped illustrate the broader context of these changes. As men pick up more domestic tasks at home, their median wages and labor-force participation could go down a bit, Heggeness noted.<\/p>\n \u201cYou see more stay-at-home dads today than you did three decades ago,\u201d she said. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be able to really understand or tell that whole story if we didn\u2019t also know what was kind of simultaneously going on with women.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Nobel winner\u2019s work has also paved the way for new conversations about more-flexible work schedules, a topic that\u2019s driven conversations about work since the pandemic began.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Goldin\u2019s research, she pointed to the lack of flexibility in working hours as part of the reason behind the gender wage gap. Many high-paying jobs have demanding schedules that include weekend and evening hours, but many women would not be able to take those roles because of family commitments, Goldin pointed out in a 2021 book.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the course of the pandemic, many workplaces have transitioned to a hybrid setup that offers remote work and flexible working hours. The biggest beneficiary has been working women: Labor-force participation for women ages 25 to 54 hit an all-time high in July, at 77.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A significant number of working parents, including Albrecht, were able to work from home and take care of their family life on the side.\u00a0<\/p>\n More employers also now offer paid leave for parents after a child is born or adopted \u2014 an indirect impact of Goldin and her work, Albrecht said. That benefit helped employers and workers, especially working women, to redraw the line between work and life, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see how you get men getting paternity leave without maternity leave coming first,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n Goldin has been a mentor to many younger women in the world of economics, economists said, including many leading female voices who help the public to understand women and the economy today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Insights from Goldin\u2019s classes, including how social norms influence women\u2019s labor-market outcomes across occupations, \u201ccome up again and again as the keys for understanding the most important labor-market trends today,\u201d said Julia Pollak, chief economist at the online job-searching platform ZipRecruiter. Pollak took two classes with Goldin as an undergraduate student at Harvard.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it\u2019s especially important that she is a woman studying women in the workforce, pushing back against a perception that a researcher is somehow biased if researching a demographic identity that they are a member of,\u201d Kate Bahn, the director of research at WorkRise, an initiative hosted by the Urban Institute, a center-left think tank, told MarketWatch. \u201cShe does respected research on a group that she is a part of.\u201d<\/p>\nNo paternity leave \u2018without maternity leave coming first\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A role model for younger women economists<\/strong><\/h2>\n