A detective from the Bronx
Claudia Dale Goldin was born on May 14, 1946, in the Bronx, New York City, to a Jewish family, and grew up in the Parkchester neighbourhood with her parents and her older sister, Judy. Her father, Leon Goldin, was a middle manager who eventually ran data processing at Burlington Industries, programming an IBM 360 and supervising a room of key-punch operators. Her mother, Lucille Rosansky Goldin, became an early childhood teacher when Claudia was about five and later an assistant principal at Public School 105 in the Bronx.
She always wanted to be a detective. As a small child she was determined to uncover the secrets of the mummies at the American Museum of Natural History. She made the most of New York, from Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts at Carnegie Hall to folk music in Greenwich Village. In junior high school she read Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters and resolved to become a bacteriologist. She attended the Bronx High School of Science and, as a high school junior, took a summer university bacteriology course at Cornell through a National Science Foundation programme.
From microbes to economics
Goldin entered Cornell intending to major in microbiology, but in her second year she took a course with Alfred Kahn, the economist who would later deregulate the airlines. His delight in using economics to uncover hidden truths, she wrote, did for economics what de Kruif had done for microbiology. She graduated in 1967 and went to the University of Chicago, then home to Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Robert Fogel and Ronald Coase. She was one of only three women in a class of 55. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1972 and published as Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820 to 1860, began as a term paper for Fogel.
Graduate school also gave her a love of nature: hiking, backpacking, birds, mountaineering in the Rockies and, above all, dogs. Her first Golden Retriever, Kelso, arrived in 1970 and lived almost sixteen years. She later trained her dogs in competitive obedience and scent work; her dog Pika became a therapy dog at a nursing home.
Finding the missing women
Goldin taught at the University of Wisconsin, then at Princeton, where she was denied tenure and never asked to give a seminar, and from 1979 at the University of Pennsylvania. Studying how families decided who worked and who went to school, she realized in the late 1970s that she had neglected the family member who would change most over the long run: the wife and mother. She had neglected her, she wrote, because the sources had. Married women’s work on farms, in family businesses, in boarding houses and at piece rates at home was largely missing from official statistics.
Given the task of building the statistical record of the female workforce for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Goldin went looking for first-hand evidence. In 1981, at the National Archives, she was allowed into the stacks and found boxes of forgotten Women’s Bureau surveys, including a 1939 survey in which employers frankly answered whether they refused to hire married women or fired women when they married. She traced widows in city directories back to the eighteenth century to reveal the hidden work of wives in family businesses, and found thousands of 1951 work-history surveys in a closet near her office at Penn. Her 1990 book, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, assembled two centuries of data for the first time.
Across the twentieth century, she found, married women’s paid participation rose from around five percent to about seventy percent. To fill gaps for the 1940s she tracked down the surveys of the economist Gladys Palmer, thousands of work histories of men and women from 1951 stretching back to 1940, which allowed her to reconstruct what happened to women workers during and after the Second World War. Much of the data, she says, was collected the old-fashioned way, by hand and often by her: the forms tell stories, and she listens.
The U-shaped curve
The evidence overturned a basic assumption: that women’s paid work rises steadily as economies grow. Goldin showed that in the United States women’s participation fell during the nineteenth century as industrialization moved work out of the home, making it harder for married women to combine work and family, and then rose in the twentieth century with the growth of office and service jobs and of women’s education. The resulting U-shaped curve has since been found in many other countries. The lesson, the Nobel committee noted, is that economic growth alone will not automatically close gender gaps.
She identified the obstacles. Marriage bars, rules that barred married women from jobs such as teaching and clerical work, peaked during the Depression. Women’s expectations also mattered: many young women in the mid-twentieth century chose their education expecting brief careers, only to return to work later when their children were grown. And with Lawrence Katz she showed, using differences in when states allowed young single women access to the contraceptive pill, that the pill let women delay marriage and childbirth and enter law, medicine and business in much larger numbers, part of what she called the quiet revolution of the 1970s.
Why the pay gap persists
Goldin produced the first long series on the gender earnings gap, covering two hundred years. It narrowed during early industrialization and again with the rise of clerical work, but changed little between 1930 and 1980 despite women’s gains in education and employment. With Marianne Bertrand and Katz she followed graduates of a top business school and found that men’s and women’s earnings start out close, but diverge sharply after the first child is born.
Her explanation, set out in her 2014 presidential address to the American Economic Association, is that many high-paying jobs are greedy: they pay disproportionately for long, unpredictable hours and constant availability. Because one partner in a couple, usually the mother, takes on more of the care at home, the other takes the greedy job, and the gap widens. The Nobel committee noted that studies in other countries have confirmed that parenthood now explains most of the earnings gap in high-income countries. Her 2021 book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity traced five generations of college-educated American women and argued that progress depends on making jobs more flexible, not only on fighting bias.
The curtain at the audition
With Cecilia Rouse, later chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Goldin spent almost a decade gathering audition records from America’s leading orchestras to study the effect of blind auditions, in which candidates play behind a screen. Their 2000 paper became one of her most cited and was referred to by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in speeches, interviews and a dissent. With Katz she also wrote The Race Between Education and Technology (2008), tracing how the rapid spread of American high schools in the early twentieth century supplied the educated workers that new industries demanded, and how the race between education and technological change has shaped inequality.
For that book she and Katz digitized a large sample of the 1915 Iowa State Census, the first and only American census to ask about education, earnings, religion, ethnicity and property. She found that the high school movement spread fastest in a belt of states from New England to the Pacific, and that the new, high-technology industries of the 1910s and 1920s hired disproportionate numbers of high school graduates even for blue-collar work. With Katz and Ilyana Kuziemko she also explained why women, once a minority on American campuses, came to outnumber men among college students. Her “pollution theory of discrimination,” a favourite of hers, explains how men can discriminate against women even without personal animosity, by guarding the prestige of their occupations.
Opening doors
In 1990 Goldin moved to Harvard, where she became the first woman given tenure in the economics department; she had also been the first female economist offered or granted tenure at Princeton and Penn. She has played this down, saying that many brilliant and determined women came before her. She directed the NBER’s Development of the American Economy programme for 28 years, served as president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and later co-directed the NBER’s Gender in the Economy group. Concerned that women made up only about a third of economics majors, she started the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge, a randomized trial testing ways to draw more women into the field.
Goldin and Katz, her long-time collaborator, are married. She was born into a Jewish family, and in 2024 she was honoured by Miriam’s Cup, which each year recognizes a Jewish woman of achievement. She has not written publicly about religious practice. In 2023 she received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes, the third woman to win the economics prize and the first to win it alone.
Legacy
Goldin changed how the world understands one of the great economic transformations of modern times: the movement of women into paid work. By recovering the evidence that official records had left out, she showed that progress has been neither steady nor automatic, and that today’s pay gap has less to do with unequal pay for the same work than with how jobs are organized around family life. Employers, governments and couples now debate parental leave, flexible hours and the design of demanding jobs with her findings in hand. Her method, patient detective work in archives followed by rigorous economics, has made history itself a tool for better policy.
Sources & further reading
Claudia Goldin, Biographical (“The Economist as Detective”), NobelPrize.org · Popular information: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2023, NobelPrize.org · 2024: Claudia Goldin, Miriam’s Cup · Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates, Jewish Virtual Library · Claudia Goldin, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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