Claudia Goldin: A 'detective' who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics 

The Nobel Prize Committee's decision to award the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Professor Claudia Goldin is a big win for women economists andeconomic historians. She is only the third woman -- and the first solo winner -- to win to this honour and economic historians have seldom been considered for the prize, which was established in 1969.

Breaking the glass ceiling, however, is not new for Goldin. She was also the first woman to secure a tenured track at Harvard University's prestigious economics department.

But beyond the usual headlines, Goldin's work on women's participation in the labour force across history is pathbreaking - to say the least.

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Goldin began her academic journey in the transformative 1970s, at the height of the feminist movement, when the role of women in the economy was rapidly changing.

In her 1998 essay "The Economist as Detective", she recalls how her lifelong passion, which ultimately awarded her the Economics Nobel, began: "Women were in the data when young and single and often when widowed. But their stories were faintly heard after they married, for they were often not producing goods and services."

As her doctoral guide, University of Chicago's Robert Fogel played a key role in Goldin's early academic career. The 1993 winner of the Economics Nobel was instrumental in drawing her into the field of economic history.

Goldin's 1995 paper, "Cliometrics and the Nobel", is a tribute to Fogel as well as a chronicle of economic history. "They (Fogel & North - the co-winner) are distinctive, because for them economic history is not a handmaiden of economics but a distinct field of scholarship," Goldin wrote arguing that Fogel formalised economic history "in a manner similar to the injection of mathematical models and statistics into the rest of economics".

But what makes Goldin's work special is her ability to see labour and gender through the prism of economic history. In doing so, Goldin has given the world, what the Nobel Prize Committee rightly states, "the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries".

While it is difficult to sum up Goldin's work in a few paragraphs, three of her research papers give us enough insights into her work.

Perhaps, the Harvard professor's most famous research paper is "The power of the pill", which traces the influence of contraceptives on women's work life. The paper argues that "the pill" granted reproductive autonomy to women, boosting their educational and career freedoms.

Another important work, "The quiet revolution", postulates how women have increasingly committed themselves to higher education and professional careers by delaying marriage and motherhood. The study also notes how more and more women entered the fields of medicine, law and management from 1970s onward, while the number of women teachers, librarians and nurses began to fell.

But her most consequential research has been on gender pay gap. Her 2014 paper, "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter", talks about how the gender wage gap is less about human capital differences but more about labor market rewarding long work hours and penalising flexibility.

One common theme in all her research work is the meticulous use of historical records -- she has collected over 200 years of data from the US -- and quantitative economic methods to understand the past and make sense of the present.

“I have always thought of myself as a detective. The detective always believes there is a way of finding the answer," she told the Nobel Prize Committee after her win. Goldin, who once dreamt of being an archeologist, has always had a knack for investigation. Archeology's loss has turned out to be economics' gain.

Goldin has used her "detective" skills to unearth economic truths, dispel myths, and make the world a more gender-sensitive place.