During an episode<\/a> of NPR\u2019s \u201cWait, Wait \u2026 Don\u2019t Tell Me!\u201d in spring 2024, host Peter Sagal told his audience how excited he was to have a new Nobel laureate\u2014economist Claudia Goldin \u201967<\/a>\u2014as a guest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI swear to you, this is true: she ignored every other interview request except ours,\u201d Sagal told his studio audience for the weekly humor-filled news-quiz program. \u201cAnd so, we\u2019re going to have her on\u2014but there is one thing\u2014everybody, when she comes on the air, we all have to pretend to be \u2018All Things Considered.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In October 2023, the Arts & Sciences alum had become the first woman ever to win an unshared Nobel in economics\u2014honored for her research on women\u2019s earnings and labor-market participation in the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And not only has Goldin studied women\u2019s advancement in the workplace, she\u2019s lived it: when she joined the Harvard faculty in 1990, she became the school\u2019s first female tenured professor in economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only has Goldin studied women\u2019s advancement in the workplace, she\u2019s lived it: when she joined the Harvard faculty in 1990, she became the school\u2019s first female tenured professor in economics.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Goldin returned to the Hill in late September to deliver the annual George Staller Lecture<\/a>; in the talk, titled \u201cWhy Women Won,\u201d she offered a data-driven perspective on the strides U.S. women have made in the workplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before a packed Schwartz Auditorium, Goldin reminded the crowd how women had once been routinely fired for getting married, becoming pregnant, or having children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She cited political struggles from the suffrage movement onward; by the 1960 presidential election, she said, women had become a pivotal constituency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI find it impossible to imagine,\u201d she observed, \u201cthat my world would be the same had women\u2019s rights remained as they were when I entered this institution as an undergraduate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldin\u2019s 2021 book, Career and Family<\/em><\/a>: Women\u2019s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity<\/em>\u2014which Foreign Affairs<\/em> praised as \u201cdeeply researched, engagingly written, and surprisingly personal\u201d\u2014explores 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But as she observes, the professions that pay the most also tend to be highly time intensive\u2014while those that are more family friendly often pay less. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This, she writes, propagates inequality between the sexes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn 1963, Betty Friedan wrote about college-educated women who were frustrated as stay-at-home moms, noting that their problem \u2018has no name,\u2019\u201d she writes in the intro. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlmost 60 years later, female college graduates are largely on career tracks, but their earnings and promotions\u2014relative to those of the men they\u2019ve graduated with\u2014continue to look like they\u2019ve been sideswiped.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014Harvard economist Lawrence Katz\u2014to walk their golden retriever, Pika, while she prepared for a media onslaught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her email quickly filled up with 1,600 congratulatory messages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Goldin later observed at the Nobel banquet: \u201cOne woman thanked me \u2018from the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters around the world\u2019\u2014that\u2019s a lot of people\u2014validating what we know to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I find it impossible to imagine that my world would be the same had women\u2019s rights remained as they were when I entered this institution as an undergraduate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n For Goldin, winning the Nobel has been the culmination of a journey that began in the 1950s, when visits to NYC\u2019s Museum of Natural History from her home in the Bronx sparked a love of archaeology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In middle school, the 1927 book Microbe Hunters<\/em> shifted her direction, and she graduated from the famed Bronx High School of Science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, as a Cornell undergrad majoring in bacteriology, she took a summer economics course that piqued her interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She went on to take a class taught by the legendary econ professor Alfred Kahn<\/a>\u2014who would, some 15 years later, deregulate airline passenger fares as chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board under President Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor some very, very odd\u2014but fortuitous\u2014reason, I took Fred\u2019s class,\u201d Goldin recalls, speaking with Cornellians<\/em> during her campus visit in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was an operatic singer. He performed in Gilbert and Sullivan, and he knew how to bring an audience in\u2014and he felt strongly about what he did.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n She switched her major to economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldin credits her approach to research, in part, to another Cornell professor: revered historian Walter LaFeber<\/a>, who helped encourage and hone a curious, gumshoe spirit that has served her well through decades of dusty, time-consuming, yet joyful work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She has hauled boxes, scoped out long-forgotten community directories, and unearthed antiquated work questionnaires\u2014aiming to glean data on the early- and mid-20th century workplace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI remember with Walter LaFeber\u2019s course, how excited I was to spend hours in the stacks in Olin Library, reading old newspapers\u2014things that we do online now\u2014and just searching for answers,\u201d Goldin recalls. \u201cWhat always kept me going was that if I had a question, I would be able to find the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What always kept me going was that if I had a question, I would be able to find the answer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Goldin once wrote in a book chapter titled \u201cThe Economist as Detective\u201d: \u201cThe forms tell stories and I listen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graduating from Cornell, Goldin earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago\u2014studying under a fellow alum, economic historian Robert Fogel \u201948<\/a>, who\u2019d win the Nobel in 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Her other mentors at Chicago included three more future Nobelists: Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a><\/em> and The Race Between Education and Technology<\/a><\/em>, the latter coauthored with Katz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2024, after her Nobel win, Goldin was tapped to apply her expertise to the sports world. Players in the WNBA\u2014which has surged in popularity over the last few years\u2014invited her to help them improve their salaries after their union opted out of its collective bargaining contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working pro bono, Goldin dove into research to learn the extent of inequity between the WNBA and the league\u2019s male counterpart. In June 2025, she published an opinion piece<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em> headlined, \u201cHow Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It\u2019s Embarrassing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Claudia](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/10\/2025_1348_RY_0273-A-1024x576.jpg\")
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