Lecture with Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin - Why women won
Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin took the stage of Malmstensalen for the Tore Browaldh Lecture 2025. The theme of the lecture was "Why women won".
In her lecture, Professor Goldin discussed how women have "won" in the sense that they have now achieved legal equality with men. The talk focused on the role of social movements in this development. She highlighted how the women's movements of the 1970s were able to mobilize large numbers of people at a time when gender inequalities were more pronounced. Today, with many formal barriers removed, fewer women find it worthwhile to organize, as much has already been achieved.
While she was showing a shift towards more gender equal attitudes over time, she was also emphasizing the large variation in views in the population and the resistance that the women's movement has always faced.
Another theme was the importance of the civil rights movement for the women's movement, due to the unexpected inclusion of sex in the Civil right Act of 1964, and because of the experiences of women within this movement, both of organising and of not being treated equally.
The lecture ended with a long Q&A session where attendees got the opportunities to ask their questions to professor Goldin.
Annika Lindskog, Senior Lecturer, attended the seminar. What were some things that you found interesting about the event?
"How laws that restricted women's work had been framed as "protection" of women in the early 20th Century. That negative attitudes towards working mothers with small children are particularly sticky. And that in an international comparison US has been so early to implement anti-discriminatory laws, while being so slow to implement benefits, such as maternity and paternity leave, to support women's work."
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and holds the Lee and Ezpeleta Professorship of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University. She is an economic historian and labor economist whose research spans topics such as the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern.
Professor Goldin is the recipient of the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for advancing our understanding of women's labor market outcomes.
Read her full biography on harvard.edu or nobelprize.com
