Harvard Professor Awarded Nobel Prize for Wage Gap Research

​Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin is the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for her study into the drivers of the gender pay gap. The Royal Swedish Academy announced the award Oct. 9, citing Goldin’s work “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.”

“By trawling through the archives and compiling and correcting historical data, Goldin has been able to present new and often surprising facts,” the Academy said in a press release announcing the award. “The fact that women’s choices have often been, and remain, limited by marriage and responsibility for the home and family is at the heart of her analyses and explanatory models.”

The pay gap between men and women has barely budged in 20 years, SHRM Online reported in March, citing Pew Research Center findings ahead of Equal Pay Day.

Goldin’s research traced how women’s labor participation decreased as the world transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial society and increased with the growth of the service sector and access to contraceptives that allowed them to plan their childbearing years. Part of the reason the gender wage gap hardly closed for a long period of time was due to the educational decisions young women made—at a relatively young age—that “impact a lifetime of career opportunities,” Goldin found.

Now much of the earnings difference is between men and women in the same occupation and is largely associated with the birth of their first child, according to her…