Image by pch.vectorIn October, Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, Ph.D., won the Nobel Prize in economics—only the third woman to do so and the first to win it alone. WCW Senior Research Scientist Sari Kerr, Ph.D., worked with Goldin on some of her recent groundbreaking research on the gender pay gap.
“Over the life cycle of parenting, there is a moment when child care demands greatly lessen and mothers can increase their hours of paid work and take on more career challenges,” Kerr wrote about their study in last year’s Research & Action Report. “They reach the summit and can then descend the other side of the mountain. But even though they increase their hours of work, they never enter the rich valley of gender equality. In large measure, mothers’ inability to earn the same as fathers is due to the fact that having children gives men an advantage—a fatherhood premium—that women can never catch up with, no matter how many years of work experience they have.”
This recognition of Goldin’s research is also a recognition of the gender pay gap as an important area of study in economics.
As Kerr told Insider in an interview, this recognition of Goldin’s research is also a recognition of the gender pay gap as an important area of study in economics, and it validates the work of the hundreds of researchers chipping away at the topic.
