Who Is Claudia Goldin And Why Did Nobel Academy Call Her A 'Detective'

The Nobel Economics Prize was awarded Monday to Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, for research that has advanced the understanding of the gender gap in the labour market.

Goldin is only the third woman to win this honour. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom got the award along with Oliver E Williamson, while in 2019, Esther Duflo shared it with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer.

Goldin provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market outcomes through the centuries, the Nobel committee said in the prize announcement.

She has studied 200 years of women's participation in the workplace, showing that despite continued economic growth, women's pay did not continuously catch up to men's and a divide still exists despite women gaining higher levels of education than men.

“Understanding women’s role in the labour market is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

“The fact that women’s choices have often been, and remain, limited by marriage and responsibility for the home and family is at the heart of her analyses and explanatory models. Goldin’s studies have also taught us that change takes time because choices that affect entire careers are based on expectations that may later prove to be false,” it continued. 

This year’s economic sciences laureate Claudia Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over a 200-year period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve.

The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian… pic.twitter.com/PFVNNy5NOw

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2023

'A Data Sleuth'

Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the prize committee said while Goldin's work does not offer solutions, the comprehensive research will immensely help policymakers to tackle the entrenched gender gap problem.

However it was not easy for Goldin had to become a data sleuth as she sought to fill in missing data for her research, Hjalmarsson said. For parts of history, systematic labour market records did not exist, and, if they did, information about women was missing.

“So how did Claudia Goldin overcome this missing data challenge? She had to be a detective to dig through the archives to find novel data sources and creative ways to use them to measure these unknowns,” Hjalmarsson said.

Who is Claudia Goldin 

Born in New York City in 1946, Goldin currently holds the position of Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She served as the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017 and is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy group, reports Hindustan Times. 

Her research portfolio spans a diverse array of subjects, encompassing the female labour force, gender-based income disparities, income inequality, the impact of technological advancements, education, and immigration. Her latest book, “Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity,” published by Princeton University Press, was released on October 5, 2021.

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