为什么女性收入低于男性：探究薪酬差距的经济史学家获得诺贝尔奖
Why women earn less than men: Nobel for economic historian who probed pay gap
为什么女性收入低于男性：探究薪酬差距的经济史学家获得诺贝尔奖
Claudia Goldin mined 200 years of data to show that greater economic growth did not lead to wage parity, nor to more women in the workplace.
克劳迪娅·戈尔丁 (Claudia Goldin) 挖掘 200 年来的数据表明，经济增长的加快并没有带来工资平等，也没有带来更多女性进入职场。
The 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences — the ‘economics Nobel’ — has been awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. 2023 年瑞典央行经济科学奖（被誉为“经济学诺贝尔奖”）被授予马萨诸塞州剑桥市哈佛大学的经济历史学家克劳迪娅·戈尔丁，以表彰其“增进了我们对女性劳动力市场结果的理解”。 Goldin’s work has helped to explain why women have been under-represented in the labour market for at least the past two centuries, and why even today they continue to earn less than men on average (by around 13%). 戈尔丁的研究有助于解释为什么至少在过去两个世纪里女性在劳动力市场中的代表性不足，以及为什么即使在今天她们的平均收入仍然低于男性（约 13%）。 Although such inequalities are widely recognized, they present a puzzle for economic models because they represent not just a potential injustice, but also what economists call a market inefficiency. Women seem to be both under-utilized and under-incentivized in the labour force, even though those in high-income countries typically now have a higher educational level than do men. 尽管这种不平等得到了广泛认可，但它们给经济模型带来了难题，因为它们不仅代表了潜在的不公正，而且代表了经济学家所说的市场低效率。尽管高收入国家的女性现在通常比男性拥有更高的教育水平，但在劳动力市场中，女性似乎没有得到充分利用，也没有得到充分的激励。 Goldin brought history to bear on this question through rigorous forensic analysis of how changes in women’s participation in the labour force have been influenced by social, political and technological change over the past two centuries. 戈尔丁通过对过去两个世纪社会、政治和技术变革如何影响女性劳动力参与率的变化进行严格的法证分析，用历史来回答这个问题。 “The strength of her work comes from combining careful and innovative historical data with insights from economic theories of wage determination, employment, discrimination and the political economy,” says economist Claudia Olivetti at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. 新罕布什尔州汉诺威达特茅斯学院的经济学家克劳迪娅·奥利维蒂 (Claudia Olivetti) 表示：“她的工作的优势在于将细致且创新的历史数据与工资决定、就业、歧视和政治经济学等经济理论的见解相结合。” “I am delighted to see Claudia’s work recognized,” Olivetti says. “She has been such an inspiration to many women and young researchers. Leading with passion, curiosity, integrity, she taught us to be brave and go for the big questions.” “我很高兴看到克劳迪娅的工作得到认可，”奥利维蒂说。 “她给许多女性和年轻研究人员带来了很大的启发。她以热情、好奇心和正直的态度领导着我们，教会我们勇敢地面对重大问题。” More growth; low pay 更多成长；低工资
Before Goldin’s studies, it was widely thought that the increase in the proportion of women in work over the course of the twentieth century was a reflection of economic growth — higher growth meant more women in employment. But by looking back carefully at older historical records, Goldin showed that the proportion of married women involved in paid work (for example in agriculture or textiles manufacturing) was at least as high in the late eighteenth century, when economic growth rates were much lower, as it is today. This industry was generally hidden behind an opaque census designation of ‘wife’.
在戈尔丁的研究之前，人们普遍认为二十世纪女性就业比例的增加是经济增长的反映——更高的增长意味着更多的女性就业。但通过仔细回顾更早的历史记录，戈尔丁表明，在 18 世纪末，当经济增长率要低得多时，从事有酬工作（例如农业或纺织制造业）的已婚妇女比例至少同样高。就像今天一样。这个行业通常隐藏在不透明的人口普查“妻子”称号背后。
Goldin showed that industrialization disrupted this pattern by making it harder for women to work from home. Her identification of a U-shaped curve in women’s labour participation over 200 years, published in her 1990 book
Understanding the Gender Gap
, demolished the notion of a simplistic link to economic growth.
戈尔丁表明，工业化使女性更难在家工作，从而破坏了这种模式。她在 1990 年出版的《理解性别差距》一书中指出了 200 年来女性劳动参与率呈 U 形曲线，推翻了与经济增长简单化联系的观念。
Goldin also demonstrated that, although work opportunities for women expanded in the twentieth century, especially in societies in which children leave the parental home, they were not exploited as much as they could have been.
戈尔丁还表明，尽管二十世纪妇女的工作机会有所增加，特别是在儿童离开父母家庭的社会中，但她们并没有受到应有的剥削。
Goldin explained this shortfall as being down to expectations. Influenced by what they saw in their parents’ generation, young women tended to make educational choices that did not reflect an expectation of future career prospects. Only by the 1970s did women anticipate how much they might be able to work and invest their efforts accordingly. As Goldin showed in collaboration with economist Lawrence Katz, that situation was boosted by access to the contraceptive pill from the 1960s, which gave women more control in planning for the future.
戈尔丁解释说，这一差距低于预期。受到父辈所见所闻的影响，年轻女性往往做出的教育选择并不反映对未来职业前景的期望。直到 20 世纪 70 年代，女性才预计自己能够工作多少，并相应地投入精力。正如戈尔丁与经济学家劳伦斯·卡茨 (Lawrence Katz) 合作所表明的那样，这种情况因 20 世纪 60 年代避孕药的使用而加剧，这让女性在规划未来时拥有了更多的控制权。
Goldin has also shown how gender inequalities in pay have not followed a simple relationship with economic growth, either. The pay gap was smaller during the industrial revolution of 1820–50, for example, because demand for clerical services increased, but changed little between 1930 and 1980, when rewards for uninterrupted careers promoted de facto wage discrimination. Goldin and Katz, with economist Marianne Bertrand, showed in 2010 that parenthood has a key role in maintaining pay inequality, largely through loss of earnings when women suspend or restrict work in favour of child-rearing.
戈尔丁还表明，薪酬中的性别不平等并不与经济增长存在简单的关系。例如，在 1820-50 年工业革命期间，工资差距较小，因为对文书服务的需求增加，但在 1930 年至 1980 年间变化不大，当时对不间断职业的奖励促进了事实上的工资歧视。戈尔丁和卡茨与经济学家玛丽安·贝特朗 (Marianne Bertrand) 在 2010 年表明，为人父母在维持薪酬不平等方面发挥着关键作用，这主要是因为女性为了抚养孩子而暂停或限制工作，从而导致收入损失。
Goldin’s research has dismantled simple ideas about how gender inequalities in labour markets have changed and the reasons for these changes. Although she has tended not to make policy recommendations for how the problems might be addressed, her scrupulous work in looking at the issues through the lens of history can help to show which interventions are more or less likely to succeed.
戈尔丁的研究推翻了关于劳动力市场性别不平等如何变化以及这些变化的原因的简单想法。尽管她倾向于不就如何解决这些问题提出政策建议，但她从历史的角度审视问题的严谨工作有助于表明哪些干预措施或多或少可能成功。
“Goldin has been saying for many years that the way work is organized in many professions is especially female-unfriendly,” says Barbara Petrongolo, an economist at the University of Oxford, UK. Petrongolo says that companies are now starting to change their practices with the introduction of flexible, family-friendly working arrangements and the provision of on-site creches. Some of these changes have happened as a result of policy interventions, but some are coming bottom-up from firms that see the advantages of attracting female talent.
英国牛津大学经济学家芭芭拉·彼得隆戈洛 (Barbara Petrongolo) 表示：“戈尔丁多年来一直在说，许多职业的工作组织方式对女性尤其不友好。” Petrongolo 表示，公司现在开始改变做法，引入灵活、家庭友好的工作安排和提供现场托儿所。其中一些变化是政策干预的结果，但有些变化是由看到吸引女性人才优势的公司自下而上发生的。
However, not all of these ideas and solutions will have universal applicability. Naila Kabeer, who studies gender in international development at the London School of Economics, points out, for example, that the U-shaped curve in female labour-force participation has not proved to hold globally.
然而，并非所有这些想法和解决方案都具有普遍适用性。例如，伦敦经济学院研究国际发展中的性别问题的奈拉·卡比尔指出，女性劳动力参与率的 U 形曲线尚未证明在全球范围内都成立。
“It was based on the idea that developing countries would go through the same processes as did advanced industrialized ones,” she says, “and did not take account that globalization would allow countries to move from farming to female-intensive industrialization processes quite as fast as they did.”
“这是基于这样的想法，即发展中国家将经历与先进工业化国家相同的过程，”她说，“并且没有考虑到全球化将使各国以同样快的速度从农业转向女性密集型工业化进程。就像他们所做的那样。”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03190-4
