Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin (born 1946, New York, New York, U.S.) American economist and winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes” in the United States and other high-income countries. Goldin was recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, for her innovative and revealing studies of the social and economic factors that have determined the extent of women’s participation in the workforce and the varying though continuous wage gap between women and men from the late 18th century to the present. Goldin was the third woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics and the only woman to have been the sole winner of the prize.

Education and academic career

Goldin attended Cornell University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1967, and the University of Chicago, where she earned master’s and doctoral degrees in economics in 1969 and 1972, respectively. She taught economics as a lecturer or professor at several universities, including the University of Wisconsin, Princeton University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990 she became the first woman to be granted a tenured professorship in economics at Harvard, where she was later named Henry Lee Professor of Economics and Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences. Goldin also served as director of the Development of the American Economy Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), president of the Economic History Association, president of the American Economic Association, and codirector of the NBER’s Gender in the Economy working group.

Contributions to economic history and labor economics

Goldin’s Nobel Prize-winning research provided a historical perspective on the differences in rates of employment and wages between women and men, one that clearly explained how and why those differences have varied over time and persisted to the present day. Her analyses were based on groundbreaking research into the origins and development of gender-based economic disparities, which corrected conventional but mistaken assumptions and expanded knowledge in areas that had been poorly understood until Goldin’s findings enriched the fields of economic history and labor economics.

The historical misunderstandings corrected by Goldin’s research included the widely accepted assumption that economic growth uniformly results in increased paid employment of women—in other words, economic growth creates jobs for women, and the longer economic growth continues, the more jobs for women there are. This common view is simplistic, in part because it is based on data drawn almost entirely from the 20th century. In her book Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990), Goldin identified actual trends in women’s employment in the United States that had been obscured by misleading official data (or the absence of official data), finding that the beginning of widespread industrialization—the shift from a largely agrarian to a largely industrial economy—in the late 18th century caused women’s employment to decline and that this trend continued through the Industrial Revolution until the early 20th century. Fewer jobs were available to women in part because, unlike the agricultural or cottage-industry work they had generally performed until the late 18th century, industrial employment (e.g., factory labor) required women to spend most of their time away from their homes and families—thus making it difficult, if not impossible, for married women to combine employment with their assumed roles as domestic laborers and family caregivers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, other factors beyond economic growth came into play and contributed to an increase in American women’s overall employment rate. They included the emergence of the service sector, which entailed a greater number of clerical and administrative jobs, and greater educational opportunities then available to women. Although this trend continued through the 20th century, it was significantly impeded by other factors, such as social prejudices and legislation (partly based on such biases) that required the dismissal of women employees in certain professions as soon as they married; by the overall tendency of young women before the 1950s to make decisions limiting their educational opportunities based on the assumption that they would be employed for only a brief period and then leave their jobs after they were married; and the tendency of employers to disfavor women job candidates who had temporarily left the workforce to raise a child, on the ground that their relevant job experience was less than that of single women or men in the same profession. Despite these limiting factors, women’s employment was given a significant boost in the late 1960s with the introduction of birth control pills, which facilitated family planning for young women and gave them greater control over their educational and employment opportunities.

Goldin’s revelation of the real history of women’s employment thus demonstrated that changes in the employment rate of American women in the last two centuries cannot be graphically represented by a simple line extending upward in parallel with a line representing economic growth. An accurate representation would instead take the form of a U-shaped curve—the left side of the letter corresponding to the decline of women’s employment in the 19th century, the bottom to the low point of that trend, and the right side to a reversal of the trend from the early 20th century.

Other historical research by Goldin cited by the Royal Swedish Academy concerned the wage gap between women and men. Goldin showed that wage gaps that are explainable only as the result of sexual discrimination actually increased from the early 20th century and the rise of the service sector, despite a decrease in the overall pay gap. Goldin also found that, even today, women’s wages tend to decrease, or increase at a lower rate, as compared to those of men as soon as a woman gives birth to a child, partly because new mothers tend to be perceived as (or in reality are) less capable of meeting employers’ typical expectations of constant availability.

Goldin has authored several influential books and journal articles, in addition to the work cited above. Her books include Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820 to 1860: A Quantitative History (1976), Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity (2021), and An Evolving Force: A History of Women in the Economy (2023). She is also the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and honors, in addition to the Nobel Prize, for her work in economic history and labor economics. They include three Richard A. Lester Prizes (awarded in 1990, 2008, and 2022) for outstanding publications in economic history; teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania (1989) and Harvard University (1995); and the Mincer Prize, awarded by the Society of Labor Economists, for career achievement in labor economics (2009).