Claudia Goldin, who collected more than 200 years of data from the USA and investigated the place of women in the workforce over the years, investigated how and why gender differences in employment rates changed over time. In her study, she found that the participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society in the early 19th century, but began to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin demonstrated that women's participation in the labor market did not show an increasing trend throughout this period, but instead formed a U-shaped curve, explaining it as a result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women's home and family responsibilities.
Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for her work revealing the causes of deep-rooted wage and labor market inequality between men and women, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday. Goldin, who became the first woman to work in Harvard's economics department in 1990, made history by becoming the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics and the first woman to win the prize alone rather than sharing it.
