Speaker

Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin

American economic historian and labour economist, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and 2023 Nobel laureate in economics — the first woman to win the prize unshared and the third woman to receive it at all.

Goldin’s research spans more than four decades of questions that intersect economic history, labour economics, and gender. Her foundational contribution was reconstructing US women’s labour-force participation from the early nineteenth century forward, showing that it followed a U-shaped curve — high when women worked on family farms, then falling as industrialisation moved work outside the home, then rising again through the twentieth century. That historical lens shaped her subsequent work on the gender pay gap: rather than treating the gap as a static product of discrimination, she traces it through changing occupational structures, the rise of higher education, and the evolving relationship between work and family. Her concept of ‘greedy jobs’ — roles that reward availability non-linearly, penalising those with caregiving responsibilities regardless of their raw productivity — has become the organising idea in her 2021 book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity.

Core positions

The gender pay gap is not primarily about wage discrimination for identical work, but about the premium high-paying professions place on long, inflexible hours. Goldin holds that the structural fix is substitutability — making it possible for workers to hand tasks off with high fidelity and trust — rather than anti-discrimination law, which addresses a problem that is no longer the main driver. She is optimistic that the cost of achieving flexibility has been overstated, particularly as remote-working tools lower the trust barrier. On education, she argues that economics has mismarketed itself to women by emphasising formal models over its actual subject matter — human behaviour, inequality, health — and that the gender skew in the field is largely a correctable PR failure. She is sceptical of cross-country happiness research as a welfare measure, preferring revealed preference: a mother who would never trade away her child is likely better off than a hedonic survey suggests.

In the wiki