Reflections on the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize Awarded to Claudia Goldin

the Prize for Economic Sciences awarded to her in 2023 for, in the words of the Nobel Committee, "having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes".I hope economists everywhere are studying her research and devising ways to build upon it.Here, I summarize her most important contributions and also explain what I take to be some significant limitations of her theoretical perspective.Gender inequality in earnings cannot be entirely blamed on discriminatory preferences, because it is deeply inscribed in the institutional structure and technology of modern economies.In her latest book, Career and Family, Claudia Goldin drives this point home.Along the way, she provides a compelling history of the ways in which successive cohorts of college-educated women in the U.S. managed to engineer new routes of economic opportunity and lead a "quiet revolution" in gender roles (Goldin 2021).In her view, the biggest roadblock women now face-conflicting demands of work and family-is emblematic of a larger conflict between efficiency and equity.Her basic argument will be familiar to fans of her previous research, especially her 2006 American Economic Review article on "The Quiet Revolution: That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family."Career and Family, aimed at a larger audience, includes biographical narratives that illustrate the ways in which individual women built on the successes of previous generations to claim opportunities for themselves.At the same time, it emphasizes a basic dilemma that limits women's room for maneuver.Paid work is greedy, and families are needy.Women prefer the flexibility to commit to both but pay a high price for 'having it all' because the