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Nobelist Explores Women’s Role in the Workplace—And Lives It

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By Blaine Friedlander

During an episode of NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” in spring 2024, host Peter Sagal told his audience how excited he was to have a new Nobel laureate—economist Claudia Goldin ’67—as a guest.

“I swear to you, this is true: she ignored every other interview request except ours,” Sagal told his studio audience for the weekly humor-filled news-quiz program. “And so, we’re going to have her on—but there is one thing—everybody, when she comes on the air, we all have to pretend to be ‘All Things Considered.’”

In October 2023, the Arts & Sciences alum had become the first woman ever to win an unshared Nobel in economics—honored for her research on women’s earnings and labor-market participation in the 20th century.

And not only has Goldin studied women’s advancement in the workplace, she’s lived it: when she joined the Harvard faculty in 1990, she became the school’s first female tenured professor in economics.

Not only has Goldin studied women’s advancement in the workplace, she’s lived it: when she joined the Harvard faculty in 1990, she became the school’s first female tenured professor in economics.

Goldin returned to the Hill in late September to deliver the annual George Staller Lecture; in the talk, titled “Why Women Won,” she offered a data-driven perspective on the strides U.S. women have made in the workplace.

Before a packed Schwartz Auditorium, Goldin reminded the crowd how women had once been routinely fired for getting married, becoming pregnant, or having children.

She cited political struggles from the suffrage movement onward; by the 1960 presidential election, she said, women had become a pivotal constituency.

Claudia Goldin ’67 speaks to a packed lecture hall during the George Staller Lecture series in Rockefeller Hall on Thursday, September 25, 2025. (Ryan Young / Cornell University) — ryan young / cornell university

“I find it impossible to imagine,” she observed, “that my world would be the same had women’s rights remained as they were when I entered this institution as an undergraduate.”

Goldin’s 2021 book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity—which Foreign Affairs praised as “deeply researched, engagingly written, and surprisingly personal”—explores how generations of women from the early 1900s to today have made advances in education and the workplace that have enabled them to better balance work and family.

But as she observes, the professions that pay the most also tend to be highly time intensive—while those that are more family friendly often pay less.

This, she writes, propagates inequality between the sexes.

“In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote about college-educated women who were frustrated as stay-at-home moms, noting that their problem ‘has no name,’” she writes in the intro.

“Almost 60 years later, female college graduates are largely on career tracks, but their earnings and promotions—relative to those of the men they’ve graduated with—continue to look like they’ve been sideswiped.”

As is tradition, Goldin found about her Nobel when a representative from the prize committee called her around 4:30 a.m.; the news would become public an hour and half later. She recruited her husband—Harvard economist Lawrence Katz—to walk their golden retriever, Pika, while she prepared for a media onslaught.

Her email quickly filled up with 1,600 congratulatory messages.

As Goldin later observed at the Nobel banquet: “One woman thanked me ‘from the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters around the world’—that’s a lot of people—validating what we know to be true.”

I find it impossible to imagine that my world would be the same had women’s rights remained as they were when I entered this institution as an undergraduate.

For Goldin, winning the Nobel has been the culmination of a journey that began in the 1950s, when visits to NYC’s Museum of Natural History from her home in the Bronx sparked a love of archaeology.

In middle school, the 1927 book Microbe Hunters shifted her direction, and she graduated from the famed Bronx High School of Science.

Later, as a Cornell undergrad majoring in bacteriology, she took a summer economics course that piqued her interest.

Claudia Goldin in the 1967 Cornellian yearbook — The *Cornellian*

She went on to take a class taught by the legendary econ professor Alfred Kahn—who would, some 15 years later, deregulate airline passenger fares as chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board under President Jimmy Carter.

“For some very, very odd—but fortuitous—reason, I took Fred’s class,” Goldin recalls, speaking with Cornellians during her campus visit in September.

“He was an operatic singer. He performed in Gilbert and Sullivan, and he knew how to bring an audience in—and he felt strongly about what he did.”

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She switched her major to economics.

Goldin credits her approach to research, in part, to another Cornell professor: revered historian Walter LaFeber, who helped encourage and hone a curious, gumshoe spirit that has served her well through decades of dusty, time-consuming, yet joyful work.

She has hauled boxes, scoped out long-forgotten community directories, and unearthed antiquated work questionnaires—aiming to glean data on the early- and mid-20th century workplace.

“I remember with Walter LaFeber’s course, how excited I was to spend hours in the stacks in Olin Library, reading old newspapers—things that we do online now—and just searching for answers,” Goldin recalls. “What always kept me going was that if I had a question, I would be able to find the answer.”

What always kept me going was that if I had a question, I would be able to find the answer.

In fact, in the early 1980s, as an associate professor at Penn, Goldin was so dogged in examining data at the National Archives in Washington, DC, that a staffer finally let her work in the stacks; she accidentally got locked in, and had to escape through the garage.

As Goldin once wrote in a book chapter titled “The Economist as Detective”: “The forms tell stories and I listen.”

After graduating from Cornell, Goldin earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago—studying under a fellow alum, economic historian Robert Fogel ’48, who’d win the Nobel in 1993.

(Her other mentors at Chicago included three more future Nobelists: Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler.)

Claudia Goldin speaking with a room full of male economists while a grad student at the University of Chicago — Goldin chats with fellow scholars as a grad student; Robert Fogel ’48 is third from right.

She taught at several institutions including Princeton and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before joining the faculty at Harvard, where she now holds an endowed professorship.

In addition to teaching, she serves a co-director of the Gender in the Economy group in the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a past president of the American Economic Association, among numerous other professional activities. Her books include Understanding the Gender Gap and The Race Between Education and Technology, the latter coauthored with Katz.

In 2024, after her Nobel win, Goldin was tapped to apply her expertise to the sports world. Players in the WNBA—which has surged in popularity over the last few years—invited her to help them improve their salaries after their union opted out of its collective bargaining contract.

Working pro bono, Goldin dove into research to learn the extent of inequity between the WNBA and the league’s male counterpart. In June 2025, she published an opinion piece in the New York Times headlined, “How Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

In June 2025, Goldin published an opinion piece in the New York Times headlined, “How Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

She’d found that the previous season, the average NBA salary was around $10 million—80 times the average ($127,000) for women players. But the audience gap is far narrower, with the WNBA attracting about a third as many viewers as the NBA.

“The world of women’s professional basketball is ripe for an economic update that better reflects its influence and irresistibility,” wrote Goldin, who marked a rare milestone for an economist when her work was featured in Sports Illustrated. “But it has not happened yet.”

Goldin even attended the WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis—the first time she’d been to a women’s pro basketball game.

And in July 2024, she enjoyed another sports first. In front of a near-capacity crowd at Fenway Park, the Boston Red Sox brought in the left-handed economist to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a game against their archrivals, the New York Yankees.

Claudia Goldin (pictured) photographed throwing the first pitch at Fenway Park. — Niles Singer / Harvard University

Naturally, Goldin didn’t come unprepared: she’d not only practiced, but tapped a colleague’s teenage sons—both left-handed pitchers—for advice on the mechanics.

At game time, Goldin threw the ball right over the plate to the Sox’s Liam Hendriks, a three-time All-Star.

But here’s the kicker: after Hendriks caught the baseball, the MLB player asked the Nobel laureate to autograph it.

Top: Goldin during her visit to campus in September 2025. (Ryan Young / Cornell University)

Published October 10, 2025

Nobelist Explores Women’s Role in the Workplace—And Lives It

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