On October 9th, Harvard University increased its list of awe-inspiring Nobel Prize Laureates by one. Claudia Goldin, Harry Lee Professor of Economics, was awarded the prize “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes,” according to the Nobel Prize’s official website. Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, declared that Goldin’s meticulous research into women’s earnings and their role in the labor market revealed reasons for developments in labor market participation—or lack thereof—over time. Additionally, she proposed what key barriers need to be addressed as we strive towards closing the gender wage gap and achieving equity in economic opportunity for men and women. Last week, the Harvard Independent interviewed Goldin in pursuit of a deeper insight into her fascinating work.
Claudia Goldin is an Economic Historian who earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Cornell University and her Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Economics from the University of Chicago. “I think about big issues and big changes in economies over long periods of time,” she stated in her interview. Her prize-winning research draws upon over 200 years of data and concerns female participation in the United States’ labor force throughout history.
Goldin asserted that the origins of her interests in women’s participation in the economy and the interaction of home and work came out of her earlier work on race and the labor force. The subject of her PhD dissertation was urban slavery in the American South, and later she explored the reasons for the shared impoverishment of African-American and White women following the end of the Civil War despite the race-driven disparities between the work they were doing, amongst other topics pertaining to womens’ positions in the labor force.
When she came to Harvard, Goldin shifted her focus to women’s careers and families, inspiring her book Career & Family in 2021. Goldin’s work encompasses far more than was highlighted by the Nobel Prize Committee, including important work on the history of education.
In the interview, Goldin stated that the Nobel Prize Committee highlighted two aspects of her comprehensive research. “My work tries to understand the reasons why [women enter the labor force] and the impacts that it has [on society].” In addition to investigating women’s roles in the labor force throughout history, she is interested in their present situation. “When we peer into the labor force, we see … gender differences in what men and women do in the labor force, and the question is why and what impact it has.” She grappled with this key question of why, despite there being large changes in education and professional schools with women constituting a larger share of college graduates, many of them still earn less than men in the same field.
Essentially, this boils down to inequality in wages arising as a result of gender inequity. When a couple has a child, one of them usually makes changes to their employment to become the designated “on-call” parent, whilst the other has the flexibility to pursue their career with fewer adjustments. Traditionally, Goldin distinguishes between the “flexible job” of the on-call parent and the higher-paying, less accommodating job retained by their partner. “The larger the difference in the earnings between the two jobs, the more money would be left on the table if both parents took the more flexible job,” she explains. “Therefore, they are enticed by the labor market to give up couple equity … and because of that, they essentially throw gender equality under the bus.” Women certainly seem to be the ones compromising their career more frequently by taking, on average, longer maternity leave than the paternity leave of their male spouses: according to a study conducted at Ball State University, only 5% of fathers take two or more weeks of leave despite being entitled up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave by the Federal government.
Goldin emphasizes three main strategies when it comes to how to reduce the difference in earnings between men and women. The first would be to either make high-paying, desirable jobs more flexible and thus more compatible with childcare, or make flexible jobs become more productive. Goldin cites the Covid-19 pandemic as an example that perfectly exhibited the feasibility of this option. Another possibility involving government policy might be to subsidize care goods, as “someone may still have to be the on-call at-home parent, but the cost of care is a lot less.”
The most revolutionary change would be to alter the traditional family structure through distributing the on-call parent role more evenly between men and women, or “flipping a coin,” as Goldin has named it. “You would still have couple inequity, but you wouldn’t have gender inequality.” Naturally, she admits that this is a more precarious approach, because it requires us to rethink or change gender norms.
Regarding her position at Harvard, Goldin explains that she thinks of herself as a “researcher-teacher,” the terms ‘researcher’ and ‘teacher’ being mutually inclusive. “I cannot do the research that I do, or any research, without being a teacher…The only way you know if you’re correct about something is if you can say it to someone and have them understand it.” Goldin expounds that sharing her knowledge with her students is the only way she can test if it is actually true.
Professor Goldin came to Harvard University in 1990 and is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics. Not only was Goldin the first woman to join the University’s Economics department, she is the third woman to win the Prize in the Economic Sciences category and the first to win it individually. In addition to her research, Goldin is a devoted teacher. This fall, she is teaching a Junior Seminar at the College called “Economics of Work and Family” that, according to the course’s website, explores how “the most personal choices and life transitions” are decided.
Goldin’s advice for Harvard students? First and foremost, she advises to “figure out what your passions are,” admitting that this may be easier said than done, having started her own undergraduate degree with the intention of studying microbiology. “You shouldn’t let anything stand in your way … Even if you didn’t do very well in a course, that doesn’t mean that you’re not good at it—it may mean that it wasn’t taught very well for you.”
Ana-Mara Leppink ’27 (aleppink@college.harvard.edu) will be adopting Goldin’s last statement as her mantra during midterm season.