By conferring this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics on Claudia Goldin, the jury has made a significant contribution to humanising mainstream economic theory. Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has spent over four decades of her career studying factors that explain the difference between labour market outcomes for men and women. That this is a subject worth studying and recognising within the discipline should be obvious to anyone who has seen real world labour markets. But the tyranny of what is often referred to as mainstream economics, which thinks of economic actors as perfectly rational agents, and has been obsessed with quantitative models to predict their behaviour, has managed to ignore the importance of this fact long enough. Recognition of Goldin’s individual effort, and more importantly, her contribution in encouraging more economists to look at economics from the perspective of gender, is finally an acknowledgement of the fact that identities matter when it comes to economic outcomes and policy must do what it can to ensure that they do not become a source of systemic inequality.
Lest there is any confusion, Goldin being awarded the biggest prize in economics is much more than correcting a historical wrong. Women continue to face active and passive discrimination in labour markets across the world because of various factors. The challenge is particularly acute in India where labour force participation rates for women are much lower than even comparable countries with a lot of it attributable to disproportionate burden of household responsibilities and regressive social norms. For policy to even start making a move towards correcting this problem, we need much more academic engagement with these questions which take inspiration from but also go beyond Goldin’s work.
