A few years ago I took a class on the most influential modern economists. It was at an Ivy League institution in the US and dozens of old, white men and their theories made the syllabus. Claudia Goldin was the only woman. On the slide accompanying the lecture in which she was featured, her name was misspelled.
On Monday, Goldin won the Nobel economics prize. After Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019, Goldin is only the third woman to win, and the first to be honoured solo.
Goldin’s work has been instrumental in our collective understanding of why gender gaps exist and how female labour force participation has ebbed and flowed over time, buffeted by social, cultural, political and economic factors. Her research, in many ways, formed the basis of my upcoming book, a narrative history of female economic empowerment since the second world war. Her credentials, even before this week, unequivocally qualify her as one of the pre-eminent economists alive today.
And yet still, in recent years, it feels like the topic of women in the economy has been sidelined, marginalised and relegated to the fringes of the field. One very obvious example is the unpaid labour market, which, globally, is overwhelmingly dominated by women – often doing care and domestic work – and is entirely unaccounted for in widely accepted standards and measures of economic activity, growth and productivity. An enormous sector, absolutely required for a functioning economy, is still totally invisible in our measurements and calculations.
Last week the consultancy McKinsey and the nonprofit LeanIn published their annual Women in the Workplace report, comprising research on 276 companies in the private, public and social sectors. It concludes that women are still systemically held back in the workplace because of a host of factors, ranging from inadequate childcare, expectations, norms, unconscious bias and outright discrimination.
In my own research I was shocked to find that business leaders – including the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest corporations – still place the onus on women to fix economic inequality between genders. Some are still convinced that the enduring gender pay gap is simply a function of women’s choice; a symptom of women just not being as professionally ambitious as their male counterparts.
Elsewhere, economics as presented in the media is still an almost entirely male-dominated domain, with men disproportionately cited and quoted in coverage. And, according to one extensive study, just 0.02% of news coverage globally focuses on seven substantive gaps between men and women, in pay, power, safety, authority, confidence, health and ageism. Every one of these gaps has economic implications.
However, it doesn’t get more prestigious or more mainstream than the Nobel. The work of the winners is designated as among the most consequential and relevant to the world in which we live. As such, I’m optimistic that Goldin’s victory marks the beginning of a new acceptance – an unprecedented acknowledgment – that women’s economics is mainstream economics.
I’m hopeful that the potential value of closing the gender pay gap, and other gender gaps, globally, will start to become common knowledge: that economists at central banks and professors at universities will as readily talk about the fact that doing so could add $7tn to the world economy as they talk at present about supply and demand curves.
According to research conducted by the UN, only 61.4% of prime working-age women are in the labour force, compared with 90.6% of prime working-age men. And as it stands, the next generation of women will probably still spend, on average, 2.3 more hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work than men. It’s mostly invisible labour that holds women back from reaching economic autonomy and independence. And this doesn’t just matter to women, it matters to all of us.
In a beautiful bit of irony, just a few hours before Goldin’s prize was announced, she published a working paper titled Why Women Won. In it, she details 155 critical moments in US women’s rights history between 1905 and 2023. Then she herself became the subject of what’s certainly deserving of the 156th spot on that list.
My wish is that in years to come we won’t need to refer to lists such as this, and the gender of a Nobel prize winner will no longer be deemed almost more newsworthy than the merit of the work that actually earned that laureate the prize. This is the beginning of a new chapter, but the work that still lies ahead is considerable.
Josie Cox is a journalist and broadcaster specialising in business, finance and gender equality
