This year, the Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to North American Claudia Goldin (New York, 1946), a professor at Harvard University (Massachusetts). According to a profile published by Harvard University, her research topics include the female workforce, the gender gap in income, inequality, technological change, education and immigration.
As can be seen, all of Goldin’s work deals with the influence of identity on economics. In its beginnings, economic analyzes used prototypical actors, representative agents, for their study, so the individual was devoid of any characteristics. Later, economics accepted group diversity with similar socioeconomic characteristics; Essential characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation, culture or place of birth have long been outside the scope of economic analysis. It was Goldin who fully introduced the economic implications of “identity”.
In this general panorama, the most intense, significant and creative part of her research was related to gender and a dominant theme: wage and labor force participation gaps between women and men. Her work paves the way for “understanding women’s outcomes in the labor market.” That is why it has become a landmark in times when women are making steady strides towards full equality not only legally and politically but socially and above all in the workplace.
Economists who have celebrated this groundbreaking Nobel Prize, such as former World Bank chief economist and Yale professor Benny Gauziano, have highlighted two key areas in Goldin’s research. One of them is the rejection of the old theory that women automatically enter the workforce as countries develop and become richer. The relationship between women’s employment and development is complex and involves a variety of factors, such as the regulation of the labor market, the family situation and especially the presence of children, as well as the static forces of supply and demand. Proof that this theory is wrong is that India has a labor market participation rate of only 30% for women, one of the lowest in the world, but has declined in recent years. Despite two decades of strong growth. The country during that period. Goldin’s observation is linked to another encouraging empirical finding: the integration of women and other underemployed minorities into the production system can lead to significant increases in a country’s productivity and income.
Another area of analysis that this renowned economist traversed was the relationship between motherhood and the wage gap, although complex, but unequivocal. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the professional development of men and women is similar from the time they enter the labor market until the woman has her first child; At this stage, the woman is usually irrevocably left behind. This is especially true at the middle and higher professional levels, which are heavily populated by women in developed economies where women’s emancipation is a reality. However, it is empirically verifiable that child punishment weighs more heavily on wage and occupational decisions than racial bias or discrimination. Goldin makes the bitter thesis that the current nature of individual work is no longer compatible with the needs of the growing family. Reconciliation must progress to full equality, with equal terms of motherhood and fatherhood that distribute the burden between both sexes. Spain has already traveled a useful life in this direction, feminism, in all its dimensions and in all its forms, has encouraged half of the population from power to firmly free them from their gender burdens.
