The challenges of American and Indian women from a Goldin lens

Women in both countries suffer similarly as their capitalist models pit the labour market against the desire to have a family

- RAVINDER KAUR

Recognition for Claudia Goldin’s work may have come late but for several reasons it might be all the sweeter. She is the only woman in Economics to have won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences on her own. Goldin’s body of work has already had a major impact on several key gender equality issues, such as women’s education, participation in the labour force, gender wage gaps and discrimination in hiring. I first came across her work while researching the son preference in India, and in particular how women’s withdrawal from the labour force lowers their value (and that of their daughters) in society. Goldin’s U-shaped curve made eminent sense in the Indian context where poorer women work out of necessity and exit the labour force when household income rises. Where women are better educated, they rejoin the labour force if they have the skills for “respectable jobs". Sometimes this doesn’t go as expected—a subject for another discussion.

Goldin is one of only two Economics Nobel laureates who have received the prize for their work on the family. Gary Becker, who received it in 1992, in part for his path-breaking book, A Treatise on the Family, was an advisor to Goldin. However, their approaches to understanding the family (and, by definition, gender) are somewhat different. Becker brought a rational choice approach to understand household resource allocation and decision-making in marriage, family and fertility. In contrast to Becker’s abstract utility-maximizing individual, Goldin provides nuanced explanations of the shifts in women’s labour force participation by placing their aspirations and decision-making in changing socio-historical contexts at the forefront.