Economics Nobel to Claudia Goldin: Women Matter!  

The Nobel Prize for Economics this year was awarded to Prof. Claudia Goldin, Harvard University, for her pathbreaking research, among others, on how much women matter.  I knew Claudia when she taught at Princeton, during my extended sabbatical there, 1970-73.   

     New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column, explaining her pathbreaking research. Here are excerpts:

  • in 2002, …. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz published an article titled “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions.”  …. they were entering a sparsely populated field. If it never occurred to you that modern birth control was a transformative technology, or more broadly that expanding women’s ability to choose had profound economic as well as social effects, you have plenty of company. There have been innumerable books and articles about the economic impacts of, for example, globalization and information technology.”    

Goldin showed how the ability of women to exercise control on childbrearing has had profound impacts on the economy, on family wellbeing, on the middle class and on the world.

           The Nobel announcement was very sparse.  Krugman notes:  “… if you ask me, the Nobel announcement sold Goldin a bit short by failing to note her hugely important contributions beyond the issue of women’s work. In particular, it didn’t mention her work on inequality more broadly, notably her role in documenting the sudden and drastic decline in inequality that took place in the 1940s, creating the middle-class society I grew up in (which has now been destroyed).”

     Krugman continues:   “For most of the 1960s, American women in their prime working years were less than half as likely as men to be part of the paid labor force; by 2000 three quarters of the gender gap in labor force participation had been eliminated.

       “This represented a large increase in the economy’s labor supply, and hence in potential G.D.P.; my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the impact of rising female employment on economic growth was comparable to, say, the effects of globalization.     But the effect on G.D.P. was only part of the story.

         “In 2006 Goldin published an extraordinary, panoramic overview of the history of women at work in America. As she documented, the percentage of women in the paid labor force rose steadily between around 1930 and 1970, a rise Goldin attributed to the combination of the economy’s shift away from manual labor toward clerical work and rising female education, along with the diffusion of household technologies like refrigerators and washing machines that freed more married women to work outside the home.”

     “But these changes, she argued, did not at first fundamentally change the way society and women themselves thought about women’s work. For the most part, women were seen and saw themselves as secondary earners, working to supplement their families’ income but ready to drop out of the work force if they had children or their husbands earned enough that they didn’t need the money.

      “Around 1970, however, there was what Goldin called a “quiet revolution” in the economic role of women, as women began to view work much the same way that men did. They saw themselves as likely to remain employed even after marriage, which led them to get more education, get married later and, as men always had, see their jobs as an important part of their identity. This was a profound transformation of society — I would say for the better.

   “And one important enabler of this transformation was the birth control pill, which made it easier for women to delay marriage, which in turn, Goldin wrote, meant that they “could be more serious in college, plan for an independent future, and form their identities before marriage and family.”

    “That said, you shouldn’t buy into crude technological determinism. Goldin and Katz noted that the pill didn’t have its most profound effects until legal restrictions that made it unavailable to most single women were removed in the late 1960s. Goldin’s latest paper, released just as she received the Nobel, is titled “Why Women Won” and emphasizes the importance of a large expansion of women’s rights between 1965 and 1973.”

      Krugman adds a word of caution.

     “And as I was reviewing Goldin’s work for this column, I couldn’t help wondering whether those victories are in danger.”

       Women matter.  They have the right to decide about their childbearing, education,  pay and futures.  Kudos to Professor Goldin.  Let’s not be complacent about the right-wing conservatives who would sabotage those hard-won victories.