As important as equal pay and other labor-market advances for women have been, progress toward economic parity with men remains tenuous and incomplete. As inequality becomes less about wages and more about wealth, women once again find themselves facing profound structural disadvantages.
PARIS – This year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Claudia Goldin, is an optimist at heart. Some might say that she needs to be. After all, her research on long-term trends in economic inequality between men and women has demonstrated, time and again, that progress for women is anything but linear. Goldin’s now-famous “U-shaped curve” shows that women in the United States were pushed out of many occupations during the nineteenth century, such that later generations then had to spend the twentieth century regaining lost ground.
PARIS – This year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Claudia Goldin, is an optimist at heart. Some might say that she needs to be. After all, her research on long-term trends in economic inequality between men and women has demonstrated, time and again, that progress for women is anything but linear. Goldin’s now-famous “U-shaped curve” shows that women in the United States were pushed out of many occupations during the nineteenth century, such that later generations then had to spend the twentieth century regaining lost ground.