This year, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Professor Claudia Goldin, of Harvard University, for her studies on women’s labour market outcomes throughout history.

We at the Forum for Research on Gender Economics (FROGEE) and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) are especially pleased to congratulate Prof. Goldin for this prestigious award. She has inspired and made possible, with her ground-breaking research, so much of the work that we conduct within our network.  Prof. Goldin’s research has measured and documented, using a very long-term perspective, the changes in the ways in which women participate in the labour market throughout the history of the United States. Importantly, she has also offered a framework to understand these changes as the result of transformations in labour demand and supply. In particular, she has highlighted how social norms, institutional barriers, and the need to balance work with family care determine women’s education and work decisions, and furthermore interact and change with developments in the economy.

This work has inspired our long-term approach in studying women's labour market behaviour in transition countries. The history of this region requires a unique lens to understand women’s choices and constraints throughout such dramatic economic and societal transformations. Prof. Goldin’s framework has also helped us identifying factors that are relevant to understand those choices and constraints in the countries that are the focus of our project, including social norms and unpaid care. One central lesson of her work, that measuring correctly economic outcomes is crucial to inform policy design, is very much aligned with our focus on gender budgeting in the reconstruction of Ukraine. By measuring systematically gender differences in reception of reconstruction funds, we can uncover gender gaps at their source and assess the need and tools to address them.

Prof. Goldin, the first woman ever tenured at Harvard Economics Department, is also engaged in research as well as interventions to attract more women to the discipline of economics. We have recently discussed women’s under-representation in academia, but also specifically in the discipline of economics, in one of our academic and policy conferences.

Presenting the award to Professor Goldin serves as a valuable and appreciated recognition of the importance of research on gender inequalities and their interplay with economic development, a field to which the FROGEE project is dedicated to contribute to.

Photo: Dilok Klaisataporn, Shutterstock