Claudia Goldin uncovered the hidden history of women’s work and pay

Person: Claudia Goldin
Lived: b. 1946
Field: Economic history, labour
From: American

The story

Claudia Goldin was born in the Bronx in 1946 to Jewish parents; her mother was a school teacher and later assistant principal. Trained as an economic historian at the University of Chicago, she realized in the late 1970s that her studies of family economics had overlooked wives and mothers, because the historical sources had. Married women’s work on farms, in family businesses and at home was largely missing from official statistics.

Asked by the National Bureau of Economic Research to build the statistical record of the female workforce, she went looking for evidence. At the National Archives in 1981 she found forgotten Women’s Bureau surveys, including a 1939 survey in which employers openly reported whether they refused to hire married women or fired women when they married. She used city directories going back to the eighteenth century to trace the hidden work of wives in family businesses. Her 1990 book Understanding the Gender Gap brought two centuries of data together for the first time.

The results changed the picture. Women’s paid work did not rise steadily with economic growth: it fell during nineteenth-century industrialization and rose again in the twentieth century, forming a U-shaped curve later found in many countries. Marriage bars, rules that excluded married women from jobs such as teaching and office work, held women back, as did expectations formed when they were young. With Lawrence Katz she showed that access to the contraceptive pill helped women delay marriage and enter professions such as law and medicine.

She also produced the first long series on the gender earnings gap. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences highlighted her finding, with Marianne Bertrand and Katz, that men’s and women’s earnings start out similar but diverge after the first child, and noted that studies in other countries have confirmed that parenthood now explains most of the earnings gap in high-income countries. Goldin argues that many high-paying jobs are greedy, rewarding long and unpredictable hours, and that making work more flexible matters as much as fighting bias.

Her research, including a study with Cecilia Rouse on blind orchestra auditions cited by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has given employers and policymakers evidence on what actually holds women back at work.

Why it matters

Goldin’s evidence guides employers and governments on equal pay, parental leave and flexible work, helping women and families combine careers and children.