The Harvard professor Claudia Goldin has won the Nobel economics prize in recognition of her groundbreaking work examining wage inequality between men and women. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday that Goldin’s research “provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries” to reveal “the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap”. She becomes only the third woman to win the prize, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. The prestigious award is worth 11m Swedish kronor (£819,000). Goldin has charted the work life and incomes of women to show that the Industrial Revolution caused a huge fall in their independent earnings compared with men before a recovery at the turn of the last century that was accelerated by changing attitudes after the second world war. The contraceptive pill allowed women to make further strides but child rearing has proved a permanent block on the progress towards wage equality. Dating back to the 1980s, “her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap”, the prize-giving body said in a statement. Goldin’s 1990 book, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, was an influential examination of how wage inequality developed over the last 250 years and the defining difference in the modern era was among couples when they first had a child. “The important point is that both lose,” she told the Social Science Bites blog last year. “Men forgo time with their family and women often forgo their career.” The bulk of the earnings difference between men and women in the same occupation arises largely when they have children, Goldin found. “Claudia Goldin’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the economic prize committee. “By finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better route forward.” Goldin was the first woman to be tenured at the Harvard economics department and has since written several books and academic papers documenting the roots of inequality. The Nobel economics award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is not one of the original prizes funded by the inventor of dynamite and was set up in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank. Past winners include the free market enthusiasts Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the left-of-centre US trade specialist Paul Krugman. Last year, the former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke was among three economists to win for their research on how regulating banks and propping up failing lenders with public funds can prevent a financial crash to rival the Great Depression of the 1930s.