The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded on Monday to the American Claudia Goldin for her work on the evolution of the place of women in the labor market and their income.
Favorite of this prize, Claudia Goldin, 77, was rewarded for having “advanced our understanding of the situation of women in the labor market”, announced the Nobel jury.
The first woman appointed to head the economics department at Harvard, this specialist in labor and economic history is only the third woman since the creation of the economics prize to be rewarded.
Until now, only the American Elinor Ostrom (2009) and the Franco-American Esther Duflo (2019) had won it.
“Claudia Goldin’s research has given us new and often surprising insight into the historical and contemporary role of women in the labor market,” said the jury.
When this distinction was announced, Mme Goldin said it was “a very important award,” but the road to professional gender equality was still long.
“It’s a very important prize, not only for me, but for many people who work on this theme and who try to understand why there remain great inequalities”, despite “important developments”, she said. declared by telephone to AFP.
A specialist in economic history, the 2023 Nobel Prize winner “highlighted the main factors of differences between men and women” and how they have evolved over the last two centuries as industrialization progressed, with a decline of women’s work during the 19th centurye century, according to the jury’s press release.
Different elements come into play: the nature of income, domestic constraints and the expectations of women.
“These elements have changed from one generation to the next,” emphasized the Nobel committee.
For a long time, young women did not expect to have a career, and it is only recently that they have integrated the possibility of a long and active career.
“In recent decades, more and more women have been studying and, in high-income countries, they generally have a higher level of education than men,” argued the jury.
” Glass ceiling “
Globally, around 50% of women participate in the workforce, compared to 80% of men, and women earn less and “are less likely to reach the top of the career ladder”, facing ” glass ceiling,” noted Nobel committee member Randi Hjalmarsson.
To reach her conclusions, Claudia Goldin carried out meticulous work, never undertaken before.
She delved into archives and collected more than 200 years of data on the United States, allowing her to show how and why differences in income and employment rates between men and women have changed over time. time, according to the jury, which evokes “the work of a “detective”, carried out before the advent of computers and the Internet. »
While historically much of the income gap could be explained by differences in education and career choices, Mme Goldin “showed that most of this income difference today is between men and women exercising the same profession, and that it largely occurs at the birth of the first child.”
His work also demonstrated that “access to the contraceptive pill” played an important role in accelerating the increase in education levels during the 20th century.e century, by “offering new possibilities for career planning”, according to the Nobel committee.
Last year, the prize went to Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the US central bank, and his compatriots Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, for their work on banks and their necessary rescues during financial storms.
The only one not to have been provided for in Alfred Nobel’s will, the economics prize “in memory” of the inventor was added much later to the five traditional prizes, earning him among his detractors the nickname ” fake Nobel.
In 1968, on the occasion of its tercentenary, the central bank of Sweden, the oldest in the world, established an economic sciences prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, making available to the Nobel Foundation an annual sum equivalent to amount of other prizes.