Claudia Goldin, a labor economist based in the United States, won this year's Nobel Prize in economics "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Monday.
Noting the gender gap in pay and female underrepresentation in the global workforce, the academy said Goldin, a Harvard University professor and an economic historian, demonstrated how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time by collecting over 200 years of data from the United States.
"Thanks to Claudia Goldin's groundbreaking research we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future," Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences Jakob Svensson said in a press statement.
Goldin is the third female economic sciences laureate. The prize money is 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), with the award ceremony to be held in Sweden on Dec. 10.
The award is formally called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Unlike the prizes established under Nobel's will, the economics prize was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and was first awarded the following year.
