This year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly called the Nobel Prize, has been awarded to Claudia Goldin for “advancing the understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Before Claudia’s empirical work, there had been little research about women’s labour market outcomes as viewed through the feminist lens of marriage, family, and fertility. As Gender Studies is often considered outside the scope of mainstream economic sciences, Claudia’s Nobel Prize represents a watershed moment for feminist research in Economics.
Claudia’s research on the evolution of women’s work in America as a result of advances in education and aspirations can apply to developing countries going through a similar shift. While the work did not address socio-economic variables such as caste and class that influence women’s labour, we can glean some fundamental lessons from it that are essential for developing countries, particularly India.
Claudia, whose work spans nearly five decades, mostly used a demand-supply paradigm to study the issues that plague women’s entry to and retention in paid labour. To understand this, she used historical data to discover a U-shaped curve in which participation was high for married women in agriculture, which then fell for those in industrial work and then increased again for those in white-collar jobs. This depiction of female labour force participation (FLFP) as a U-shaped curve is quite consistent in India, where FLFP has been steadily declining over the last two decades, as evidenced by Periodic Labour Force Surveys.
Using a similar demand-supply approach in the Indian context, we can see that, unlike the American economy, which demonstrated an even transition from agriculture to industry, the transition of the Indian labour market has not been even due to structural issues such as occupational segregation and the potential exclusion of low-educated and semi-educated women from formal employment. A research study from 2019 showed that a lack of demand for skilled labour by moderately educated women could explain the U-shaped decline in India.
It is worth noting that Claudia ascribed the growth in work participation not just to improvements in education and social expectations, but also to the development of the contraceptive pill in the United States. She demonstrated a rise in the participation of educated women in the job market throughout the latter part of the 20th century due to the postponement of their marriage and child-bearing. This led to Claudia marking the transition of women’s work from an ‘evolution’ to a ‘revolution’ in the United States. Using three phases of data between 1940 and 2000, she identified a shift in women’s identities from those who merely work because their families need money to those who see economic independence as a crucial part of their identity. This transition, which explains the supply-side phenomenon of FLFP, is significant because it explains why women’s work remains neither evolutionary nor revolutionary in India.
A 2009 study by three Indian economists showed that the participation of married women in the labour force decreased as household income increased in India, ensuring “status protection”. This “income effect”, which causes married women to leave the labour force when their husband’s education and income levels rise, has a significant impact on the supply of women in the labour market. Because the returns to home production for women are higher than the labour market returns, advancements in female education have not translated into higher labour market involvement in India.
The aforementioned facts illustrate the lack of a “revolution” of women’s identities as economically autonomous agents in India, which requires nuanced analysis. Claudia is an economic historian who has mostly investigated women’s work through the lens of neoclassical frameworks. Because she adhered to neoclassicism in her concept of economic behaviour, Claudia frequently regarded employment as a choice governed by rational decision-making and women as a homogeneous group with consistent objectives. While her emphasis on women as “productive members” may be appropriate in a post-liberal Western society, it may not be appropriate in India, where socio-cultural issues are more prominent.
Claudia in her book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity published in 2021 argued for the need for support measures for parents and caregivers so that they can be “better productive members”. Productivity-dominated economic rhetoric needs to be challenged, particularly in India, where we know there is a big gender gap in domestic labour. According to the time use survey conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in 2019, women in urban and rural India spend more than five hours per day on unpaid domestic and care duties on average. Further investigation across education and employment levels are viewed as consistent determinants of domestic equality reveal how time use estimates in India differ from Western countries. Women with higher education and women in the labour market spend more hours on unpaid labour than others in India. This demonstrates the impact of social norms on women’s behaviour, which may be understood as both a choice and a constraint.
This “double burden” faced by women may also be viewed as a consequence of the neoclassical goal of “productivity”. While the economic discourse is targeted at getting more women into paid employment, which would be great in an ideal world, it should not disregard the fact that economic goals are tainted by societal standards, particularly for women. By undervaluing certain types of work done by women simply because there is no economic value attached to them, we fail to analyse and account for the behaviour of an important group of women who may not have aspirations for paid work.
The recognition of Claudia’s work, though conventional at its core, is a significant moment in history. Focussing on the disparities associated with women’s employment is needed, but future economic research should also consider the numerous dimensions of women’s well-being that exist outside of the arena of paid labour. This win also allows us to call into question the dominant paradigms of Economics that also need evolution.
Gargi Sridharan is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS). She works in the area of gendered division of labour and well-being.