Not a 1967 story
No woman won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1967, because the prize did not yet exist. It was endowed by Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968, as a gift marking the bank’s 300th anniversary, and it was first awarded in 1969. The first woman to win it was Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist, who received the 2009 prize. The nearest link to 1967 is therefore the creation of the prize itself, which followed a year later.
An unusual prize
The economics award is officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. That long name reflects an important distinction: Alfred Nobel’s will, written in the 1890s, set up prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Economics was not among them. The economics prize was added later by the bank, although it is announced and presented alongside the Nobel Prizes and is popularly called a Nobel Prize.
The decision to add it was debated at the time and has been discussed since, in part because some critics felt that economics should not be placed alongside the sciences that Nobel named. It is, nonetheless, the same selection process in Sweden, with laureates chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The setting in the late 1960s
The creation of the prize came in a decade when economic questions were in the news. The American economy was growing but facing inflation and the cost of war and social programmes, and the international monetary order was under strain. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was showing signs of stress, the London Gold Pool was under pressure, and the pound devaluation of November 1967 was a sign of that pressure. Those events gave economics a prominent public role, even though they are not the reason the prize was founded.
Who Elinor Ostrom was
Elinor Ostrom was born in Los Angeles in 1933 and spent much of her academic career at Indiana University, where she worked with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She was trained as a political scientist, not an economist, which makes her prize unusual. She died in 2012.
She shared the 2009 prize with Oliver Williamson. The Academy recognised her for her analysis of economic governance, especially of the commons, meaning resources that are used by many people at once, such as fisheries, forests, grazing land and water supplies.
The research in plain terms
A popular idea in the late 1960s held that shared resources are doomed to be overused. The ecologist Garrett Hardin popularised the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” in an essay published in 1968. The usual reading of his argument was that, without private ownership or government control, individuals acting in their own interest would deplete a shared resource.
Ostrom challenged the idea that these were the only two options. By studying real communities, including irrigation systems, fisheries and forests in different countries, she found many cases in which users had set up their own rules for sharing and protecting a resource over long periods. Her best-known book, Governing the Commons, was published in 1990.
From these cases she drew out features that tended to appear in the more successful arrangements. These included clear boundaries about who may use the resource, rules that fit local conditions, ways for users to take part in changing the rules, monitoring of use, and graduated penalties for those who broke the rules. She was careful not to claim that these arrangements always worked, and her point was that communities could sometimes manage shared resources well, not that they always would.
Why the award mattered
Ostrom’s prize recognised an approach to economics that relied on fieldwork and comparison, not on abstract models alone. It also highlighted the role of institutions and local knowledge in solving collective problems. Her work has been used in discussions of environmental management and common resources, and it fits with the growing environmental concern that had already begun in the late 1960s, a period that saw the founding of groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967.
Women laureates since
After Ostrom, the economics prize went to further women, including Esther Duflo in 2019, who shared it with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, and Claudia Goldin in 2023. The number of women laureates remains small compared with men, which has been widely discussed in the field, and this article does not try to settle the reasons.
The short version
The economics prize was created in 1968, first awarded in 1969, and first awarded to a woman in 2009, when Elinor Ostrom was honoured for showing how communities can govern shared resources. None of this happened in 1967, though the year sits just before the prize was founded.