Claudia Goldin shattered two glass ceilings when she was named the laureate of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics.
(Bloomberg) — Claudia Goldin shattered two glass ceilings when she was named the laureate of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics.
The third woman overall to be awarded the coveted accolade, Goldin was the first woman to do it solo, and her research marks the first time women are directly the subject of the winning work.
Read More: Goldin Awarded Economics Nobel Prize for Gender-Gap Work
Before her, Esther Duflo had been awarded together with two men in 2019, her husband Abhijit Banerjee, as well as Michael Kremer. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to be awarded a Nobel in the field, shared her prize with Oliver Williamson in 2009.
The Nobel Prizes, awarded since 1901, are famously unequal, reflecting how women have been overshadowed by men in science for centuries.
The annual prizes in five of the fields were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The economic sciences award was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
In absolute terms, the economics prize has the fewest female laureates at three. But in relative terms, physics is the most unequal, with women making up just 2% of laureates (compared with 3% and 4% for economics and chemistry, respectively).
The situation is slowly improving. More women have won since 2000 than in the preceding century, and 2023 marks six years in a row since the last all-male-panel of laureates.
While Nobel officials insist gender is not a criteria taken into account when deciding on the recipient, women were awarded in four of the six categories in 2023.
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