Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded to Harvard’s Claudia Goldin for Work on Gender Gaps
Economic historian and labour economist has tracked the changing fortunes of women in the workplace
3 min
BOSTON—Harvard University’s Claudia Goldin is a labor economist, teacher and mentor. She is now also a Nobel Prize winner for her groundbreaking research on women in the workforce.
Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday, the third woman to receive the economics prize since the award started in 1969. The 77-year-old Harvard economist has spent decades analysing troves of data to produce research illuminating the history of women’s job-market experiences.
Goldin’s expansive work portfolio includes pieces on the drivers of female labor-force participation, the origins of the gender pay gap and hiring biases against women. Her paper, “Why Women Won,” which documented the evolution of women’s legal rights, published this month.
“Goldin’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, professor of economics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Goldin was admittedly tired upon entering Monday’s press conference at Harvard. She was, after all, asleep when she received the early-morning call with the news of her Nobel Prize. Still, her passion regarding decades of research and relationship-building radiated as she spoke at a press briefing.
“The increase of women in economics is important for a host of reasons,” Goldin said. “For me personally it has been important because I have had the most wonderful co-authors.”
One such co-researcher, Claudia Olivetti of Dartmouth College, said Goldin’s body of work has shaped much of the current research on women and labor markets. Perhaps less well known, Olivetti said, is Goldin’s extraordinary mentorship of women.
Goldin “has been a source of inspiration to many women in economics, generously sharing her experiences and demonstrating the possibilities of success,” Olivetti said.
Some professors view themselves as researchers, rather than teachers. Not Goldin.
“I could never do research without doing teaching,” she said. “When I teach, I am forced to confront what I think is the truth.”
Goldin was the first woman to secure tenure in Harvard’s economics department. She follows Esther Duflo in 2019 and Elinor Ostrom in 2009 as female recipients of the economics Nobel Prize.
Goldin is married to Lawrence Katz, also a Harvard economist. Both are avid bird watchers and hikers, colleagues said. She has a 13-year-old golden retriever named Pika and no children.
Around the world, 50% of women have paid jobs, compared with 80% of men, although that gap is smaller in advanced economies. Across the developed economies, women earn 13% less on average and are less likely to play senior roles in the organisations they work for.
Goldin’s research questioned the assumption that women had steadily, or would inevitably, narrow those gaps. Using data that had previously attracted little attention, she established that far fewer women worked in paid employment in the early 1900s than in 1800, while that share rebounded as the 20th century advanced, albeit slowly.
Her writing includes 1990’s “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women.” Examining 200 years of data, Goldin tracked the changing fortunes of women in the workplace as it changed from farm to factory to office.
She also identified some of the considerations that affected the decisions made by women about their participation in the workforce, as well as the constraints they faced at particular times. In one well-known paper, she examined the effect of the contraceptive pill on decisions about work and marriage.
The pay gap between male and female workers had long been attributed to differences in educational attainment, with women typically spending fewer years in formal education.
But that can no longer be true of many developed countries, where women are now better educated on average than men. Instead, Goldin’s work indicates that the gap in pay occurs with the birth of a first child, with women typically devoting more time to child care.
But darker forces are also at work. In one paper, Goldin and co-author Cecilia Rouse from Princeton University showed that the number of female members of the leading U.S. symphony orchestras rose sharply in the 1980s partly because of the adoption of “blind” auditions, where the candidate for an orchestra position auditioned behind a screen, concealing their gender or race from those doing the hiring.
In their paper, called “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind Auditions’ on Female Musicians,” the authors found data across decades of hiring by symphonies both before and after the introduction of blind auditions to show that about a quarter of the increase in female members of orchestras over that time was due to blind auditions, suggesting previous bias.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
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