Economics Nobel: Let's talk gender inefficiency

An economy tilted against women fails to make the best use of its resources. Laureate Claudia Goldin popped a money myth, studied gender gaps and opened paths to potential solutions

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The covid pandemic sent people home and revived the question of whether flexible work could help solve India's problem of abysmal levels of workforce participation by women. Work done by this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor awarded "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes," could guide us towards an answer not just to that, but maybe to other questions as well. Such as why women are paid less than men. Gender disparity has been studied deeply by Professor Goldin, who looked back at US records for two centuries plus, working out ways to fill data gaps-no mean task, given how male chauvinism can warp statistics to capture drivers of gender gaps as they changed over time. Although America is not India and our labour markets differ, many of her findings resonate with us. Her U-shaped curve for the labour participation of married women in the US, for example, may apply to any evolving economy. As traced by her, this key gender variable dropped as the Indus