The jury at the Bank of Sweden broke new ground on two counts when, on Monday, October 9, it awarded its 2023 Prize for Economic Science to Claudia Goldin. For the first time, it has chosen a woman as its sole laureate − the previous two, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019, were "co-laureates" alongside male economists (Oliver Williamson for the former, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for the latter). And they chose an economist specializing in gender inequality.
This field of economic research has developed enormously over the last 15 years, especially in the US, but the Swedish jury had until now ignored it, despite the fact that "the massive entry of women into the labor market is one of the major economic phenomena in developed countries in the 20th century," noted Hélène Périvier, an economist at the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE-Sciences Po), specializing in social and family policies.
"Claudia Goldin, now 77 years old, is finally being rewarded as a pioneer: She was the first economist to take up women as an economic object," said Philippe Askenazy, director of research at CNRS, associate professor at the Ecole normale supérieure and researcher at the Paris School of Economics. "And she did a great deal to promote women in the discipline," he added, for example by encouraging female students to enter the profession, designing programs to attract them and taking on major responsibilities herself.
While the venerable Swedish institution is striving to be more in tune with the times, it is also adhering to its traditional canons of recognizing typical institutions. Goldin is professor of economics at Harvard, the heart of the American university system − indeed, she was the first woman to win a full professorship in the Department of Economics in 1990. She was president of the American Economic Association (2013-2014), has received numerous awards and is a member of the most prestigious American research institutions (National Bureau of Economic Research, National Academy of Sciences).
Above all, in the purest tradition of economic theory, her research focuses on how American women's individual labor market behaviors "respond" to external shocks or incentives, of whatever magnitude: the economic and industrial mobilization born of the Second World War, the advent of the contraceptive pill, the arrival of a child, the recruitment or career management practices of companies and organizations. To this end, she has compiled immense long-term databases, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, on the training, qualifications, wages, jobs and careers of women in the USA.
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