The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on Monday to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor, for advancing the world’s understanding of women’s progress in the workforce.

Goldin is the third woman to have won the economics Nobel, which was first awarded in 1969, and the first one to be honoured with it solo rather than sharing in the prize.

Who is the winner?

Goldin, 77, is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She has long been a trailblazer in the field — she was the first woman to be offered tenure in Harvard’s economics department, in 1989.

She was asleep when the call informing her of the prize came in — she had gotten up earlier to let the dog out but had gone back to bed. She said in an interview that she was “delighted.”

She saw a woman winning the economics award on her own as a sort of “culmination” after years of “important changes” toward more gender diversity in the field.

The Nobel committee announced the award in Stockholm. The committee praised Goldin for her research into female employment, which showed that employment among married women decreased in the 1800s, as the economy moved away from agriculture and toward industry.

Women’s participation then increased in the 1900s, as the service sector began to expand as a part of the economy.

She also illustrated that the process of closing the gender wage gap has been uneven over the course of history. Recently, progress in closing it has been halting: Today, women in the United States make a little over 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.

In the past, gender wage gaps could be explained by education and occupation. But Goldin has shown that most of the earnings difference is now between men and women in the same jobs, the Nobel committee said. Notably, it kicks in after the birth of a woman’s first child.

New York Times News Service