It was indeed a path-breaking moment for both women and economics. Early October, Claudia Goldin, an eminent economics professor of the Harvard University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for her research on women at work. Ms Goldin became the third woman in history to win the Nobel for economics after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.

Besides, Ms Goldin’s accolade is very special because she is the first woman economist to win the Nobel solo, unlike her two predecessors who had to share the prize. Even today, economics remains a heavily male-dominated field. For instance, only three of the 92 economics Nobel laureates are women. Nobel for Ms Goldin is hence more than significant, given the poor state of women’s representation across the board.   

Like elsewhere in the world, women earn lesser than men in the US too. Ms Goldin set out with a hypothesis that differences in education and occupational choices may explain this gender gap. But her analysis of over 200 years of data from the US labour market busted many myths about gender pay gap. The Harvard professor was able to show that in many cases men were getting paid more than what women earned even when both men and women held the same jobs in similar positions.

Her research went on to prove that education and occupation could not be solely blamed for gender pay disparity. Neither could social and economic factors alone explain the gap. Instead, various other factors were at play, and motherhood was one of the major determinants.

Armed with tonnes of data, the economics professor demonstrated how motherhood impeded career progression and earning among women. Women had no choice but interrupt their careers or reduce their hours of work during their maternity period. Even when those women returned to work, they had a lot of catching up to do with their male colleagues, who had been promoted with higher pay packages. 

A related research threw up the “power of the pill” or the contraceptive pill, which has been helping in reducing the gender gap ever since it was legalised in the US in the 1970s. The pill has facilitated women to delay their marriage and motherhood, pursue higher education and take up jobs similar to those of men.

Interestingly, her amazing ascendency in the world of economics would not have happened if she had not signed up for economics at college by a sheer, pleasant accident. Fascinated by microbes, young Goldin entered Cornell University to study microbiology. But a class of eminent economist Alfred Kahn that she attended drew her to economics. After graduating in economics from Cornell University, she also earned her PhD in industrial organisation and labour economics from University of Chicago in 1972.

She joined as an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison and then moved to Princeton University and later to University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, Ms Goldin shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the first woman to gain a tenured professorship in Harvard University’s economics department.

The world has, in the meanwhile, made immense progress across diverse fields. Yet women, who constitute half of humanity, continue to lag behind men with gender discrimination still a reality. Ms Goldin’s fascinating research could dispel this darkness and help bridge the irrational gap.