STOCKHOLM - American economic historian Claudia Goldin has won the 2023 Nobel Economics Prize for her work examining wage inequality between men and women, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last of the 2023 crop of Nobel prizes and is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (S$1.36 million).

“This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries,” the prize-giving body said in a statement.

“Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.”

The award for economics is the final instalment of the 2023 crop of Nobels that have seen prizes go to Covid-19 vaccine discoveries, atomic snapshots and “quantum dots”, as well as to a Norwegian dramatist and an Iranian activist.

Professor Goldin, who in 1990 became the first woman to be tenured at the Harvard economics department, is only the third woman to win the Nobel economics prize.

She hailed the decision as “an award for big ideas and for long-term change”.

“There are still large differences between women and men in terms of what they do, how they’re remunerated and so on,” Prof Goldin told Reuters at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“And the question is, why is this the case? And that’s what the work is about.”

Her 1990 book Understanding The Gender Gap: An Economic History Of American Women was a hugely influential examination of the roots of wage inequality.

“I have always thought of myself as a detective and I wrote many years ago... a piece called ‘the economist as a detective’,” she said in a recording posted on the Nobel website. “I’ve been a detective since I was a little kid.”

She has followed up with studies on the impact of the contraceptive pill on women’s career and marriage decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator and the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates.

“Claudia Goldin’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Professor Randi Hjalmarsson, member of the Economic Prize committee.

He quoted Prof Goldin’s own words: “By finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better route forward.”

Prof Goldin’s “dedication to improving economic equality is an inspiration to us all”, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said on social media platform X.

“Both lose”

While it is illegal across much of the world for employers to discriminate on the basis of gender, women still face significant shortfalls in pay compared with men.

In the United States in 2022, women earned on average 82 per cent of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis. In Europe, meanwhile, in 2021, women earned 13 per cent on average less per hour than men, according to European Commission data.

Prof Goldin’s work revealed that while there has been progress in narrowing the gap over past decades, there is little evidence of it fully closing any time soon.

She has attributed the gap to factors ranging from outright discrimination to phenomena such as “greedy work”, a term she coined for jobs that pay disproportionately more per hour when someone works longer or has less control over those hours – effectively penalising women who need to seek flexible labour.

Ms Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, praised Prof Goldin’s “pathbreaking work”, adding that female labour force participation is “abysmally low in many countries”.

The economics award is not one of the original prizes for science, literature and peace created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, but a later addition established and funded by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.

Past winners include a host of influential thinkers and academics such Friedrich August von Hayek, Milton Friedman and, more recently, US economist Paul Krugman.

In 2022, a trio of US economists including former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke won for their research on how regulating banks and propping up failing lenders with public cash can stave off an even deeper economic crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s.

As with the other Nobel prizes, the vast majority of the economics awards have gone to men. Only two women have previously landed one – Professor Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Professor Esther Duflo a decade later.

Speaking on a recording posted on the Nobel website, Prof Goldin said the first thing she did on hearing she had won was to tell her husband, who asked her what he could do.

“I told him to take the dog out and make some tea and that I had to prepare for a press conference,” she said. REUTERS