The Nobel Committee has called this year’s recipient of the prize for Economics, Claudia Goldin, a sleuth. This is no sweet talk. Ms Goldin, much like a detective, has dug up from the everyday experiences of women a history of marginalisation in the economic sphere. Tellingly, Ms Goldin is only the third woman to win the Nobel in Economics since the award was instituted. Her work is the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries and reveals the causes of the stubborn gender gap. It busts the myth that women’s participation in the labour force had increased as economies grew. By choosing Ms Goldin as the recipient of the highest award in Economics, the Nobel Committee has provided an official stamp of legitimacy to the work of those economists who study gender discrimination in the labour market which is a global phenomenon. At the current rate, it will take 169 years to close the economic participation and opportunity gender gap according to the World Economic Forum. Significantly, although Ms Goldin’s research is primarily based on data collected from the United States of America, it can be instructive for countries around the world, especially India.
India’s female labour force participation rate is one the lowest in the world and the lowest among the G20 countries — worse than even Saudi Arabia — at 19.23% as per the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022. This in spite of a falling fertility rate and increased enrolment in schools — fundamental factors deciding women’s participation in the labour force. The change in these factors in the recent decades should have correlated to an increase in FLFPR. Instead, as per World Bank estimates, India’s FLFPR has been falling since 2004. This is where Ms Goldin’s research comes in handy: her work shows that women pay a high cost for “temporal flexibility”, where choosing to work fewer or more flexible hours to allow them to raise a family comes at the cost of a wage gap. Indian women are responsible for most of the unpaid domestic work at home. In a conservative labour market like India, with fewer flexible working options of quality, family needs translate into numerous women opting out of a paying job. India’s pandemic experience bore proof of this. As household care activities increased for women during the lockdowns, almost 17 million Indian women had to give up their jobs in the first month of the pandemic, with women’s labour force participation falling to a meagre 9% by 2022. Worryingly, the rate of their return has not been satisfactory either. There is an additional challenge when it comes to Indian women — their invisibility in the informal workforce. At least 17.19 million women in India are engaged in home-based work that has extremely poor and arbitrary wages and no social security.
Insightful research by a Nobel laureate spurs exploration that challenges or transforms ideas. The best way for India to celebrate Ms Goldin’s contribution would be for policy to ponder the questions raised by her research and use them to make analysis and policymaking gender sensitive and inclusive.
