In 2023, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, achieved a unique distinction: she became the first woman to .
The award underscored her lifetime commitment to researching women’s participation in the U.S. labor force. “When I first started working on this subject, I realized that most economic historians were studying child labor, or they were studying the labor of men,” said Goldin, after winning the prize. “But they didn’t really know what women were doing. And so that’s what I worked out.”
At a recent Institute of Politics JFK Jr. Forum, Goldin and Karen Dynan, professor of the practice of economics at vlog and at the University, talked about gender dynamics in the study of economics, her prize-winning research, and life as a Nobel Prize winner.
The title of the Forum—The Economist as Detective—came from a cartoon created by Johan Jarnestad, who illustrates the work of Nobel Prize winners. While many of the cartoons depict aspects of the science, Goldin’s image featured her as a magnifying glass-wielding investigator reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. The image highlighted the detective-like work of Goldin’s research on gender in economics.
Dynan asked if the gender imbalance in the field of economics helped shape her career’s work.
“You were the first female tenured professor in the Harvard economics department, the first in the history of the department,” said Dynan, who received her PhD in economics from Harvard.
Goldin said the late Robert Fogel, a professor at the University of Chicago and also a Nobel laureate, opened the door for her work on gender gaps in earnings, wages, and employment rates. “Bob Fogel said to a group of us, ‘What is it that we should study that we don't really know about the history of?’ And I said, ‘We should study women in the American economy.’” The rest is Nobel Prize-winning history.
Thinking about her vast body of work—Goldin has important research on broader labor market issues, inequality, education, including student loans, and unemployment—Goldin said she found the papers she liked best were the ones that found abstractions.
“If you want policies such as school choice, then we have to give people choice. And to give people choice, we have to give people data.”
Goldin credits her colleagues at the University of Chicago, where she was a graduate student, for giving her the confidence to pursue her work.
“I didn't go there to study economic history or labor. I went there to study product markets. I was absolutely in love with product markets and regulation,” she said.
“When Gary Becker [the late professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and winner of the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences] arrived, I wanted to study people, I wanted to study labor markets, I wanted to study economic history,” she said.
“When I look back at that time, I was one of two women in my class. And there was a very, very large class, so there were a lot of guys,” she said. “But I never had the sense that they treated me as being different, because they didn't take themselves seriously. They took economics seriously. They took the substance seriously. They did not take themselves seriously.”
She cited her paper “”—which looks at gender differences in occupations and earnings—as a personal favorite. “We often think that it’s two groups that don’t like each other. They’re repelled from each other, they don’t want to be together, they don’t want to work together, one doesn’t want to hire the other one, they don’t want to be good to each other,” she said.
“How could that be possible between men and women?” she continued. “That led me to write this, to think abstractly about how you have a theory of discrimination that concerns men and women.”
Another favorite is “,” a paper she co-authored with her husband Lawrence Katz, the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard, about oral contraceptives and the effects on women’s careers and marriage decisions.
“The reason I love that paper is that right now, if you say to people, “Is the pill interesting from an economic standpoint?” most people would say, “Well, of course. Of course.” Well, when I thought about this paper [in 2000], no one thought that it was. And I just knew that it was important.”
Goldin challenged students to look beyond course titles to uncover gender inequality. “You don’t have to have ‘gender’ in the title for the course to be about gender,” she said. “Every course has gender in it somewhere.”
She also addressed growing concerns for researchers: government data being removed from websites and political pressures on which data is shared and which is not. “We have to be very, very careful that these [federal] agencies that are producing these data sets be independent,” she said. “If you want policies such as school choice, then we have to give people choice. And to give people choice, we have to give people data.”
As for the fame of being selected as a Nobel Prize recipient—“that was so last year” she quipped—Goldin pointed to three outstanding benefits.
“One was that I threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox-Yankees game on July 26th,” she said. “It was high, but it was perfect.” The second was being a guest on the NPR radio show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. “People say that I am funny, so that made me feel good.”
But her favorite “perk” is being a pro bono advisor to the WNBA union, advising them on their collective bargaining—appropriately for a woman who has spent her career chronicling the economics of women in the workplace.
The entire discussion can be seen . Future forums can be found at the .
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Black and white illustration attribution ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.