In October 2023, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2023 to Claudia Goldin, for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes. She uncovered key gender differences in the labour market, and provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries.
Through her research, Goldin demonstrated through 200 years of data in the United States, that women’s participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over the years, are underrepresented, and when they do work, they earn less than men. She demonstrated that women’s participation, which was declining, increased with the growth of the service sector in the 20th century, as a result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities.
She noted that access to the contraceptive pill played a key role in accelerating revolutionary change by offering career planning choices. She found that despite rising education and employment of women in the 20th century, the pay gap persists. She identifies part of the reason being that educational decisions made at a young age affect a lifetime of career opportunities. She also found that a major portion of the pay gap arises after the birth of their first child.
She identified “greedy work” as a significant contributor, being long, inflexible work hours in high-pressure jobs that are consequently high-paying jobs where promotions are important. She noted that in these types of jobs, the gender pay gap is apparent as it is often women who not only have to choose whether to take such work which is the most financially rewarding, but who also end up bearing the primary responsibility of caregiving and hence, don’t gain in such greedy jobs. Anybody thus who scales back from work is at a disadvantage. Strikingly, she notes that women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands, rather, the women have rich husbands because they step back from work. She notes that while women now are increasingly pursuing careers to support themselves due to work being a fundamental aspect of their identity and satisfaction, as well as women’s participation in the workplace increasing, she notes that there is still a gap, arising from a reason why work is structured and that high-reward work disproportionately rewards long hours.
Goldin’s work is imperative in India today, in which we find intersectional and structural inequalities increasing. We are witnessing a rise in dishonour killings, moral policing, caste-based discrimination, informalization of labour, and gender-based violence. In the Global Gender Gap Index 2023, India ranks at a meagre 127 out of 146 countries. The informalization in labour affects women disproportionately, especially Dalit women, as they comprise a largest proportion of the informal workforce in India. The Period Labour Force Survey 2022-23 released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation denotes that female labour force participation rate is 37% in India. However, the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy found that only 10% of working age Indian women in 2022 were either employed or looking for jobs.
Entrenched gender roles, cultural norms, patriarchal beliefs and layered discrimination based on both caste and class inform the manner in which Indian women participate in the workforce. We find not only that women are discouraged from pursuing so-called “risky” but high-reward professions, but are also pushed into so-called “female occupations” largely surrounding household work, such as garment work, cleaning, sanitation, housekeeping, sweeping, food distribution, etc. Emergent circumstances such as the pandemic also deprived women of their livelihood opportunities because of the informal nature of these occupations.
There also exists a perceptible absence of women in leading roles in both the formal and informal sector. A long-standing demand of All India Progressive Women’s Association has been to recognize household work as unpaid labour, which would also serve as an explanation for the disparity in wages. Claudia Goldin’s work provides an important metric we must use to ask the right questions regarding the persisting inequality of women’s labour in India.
