- [Claudia] When you do economic research,
you have three pieces.
I think of them as balls
that I want floating up all the time.
I'm juggling them,
and one of them is the idea.
I have to begin with "What's the question,
what's important?"
♪ [music] ♪
- [Narrator] Economists --
not a group with a lot of Marys, Natashas, or Juanitas,
and that's caused a lot of controversy.
However, what's often overlooked are the actual female economists
who are pushing economics forward by addressing real-world issues.
Welcome to Women in Economics.
- [Ilyana] One thing I definitely learned from Claudia
is to approach economic research like a detective.
I think, especially, when working in economic history,
when you can't just download a cleaned-up dataset,
you really have to go searching, open dusty boxes
and look under rocks.
- [Lawrence] She is the consummate economic historian.
She has been the innovator and pioneer
on bringing economic logic, and historical and better data,
to understanding women's role in the economy.
And then she is a fantastic labor economist,
who had been a leader in work on understanding inequality.
- [Narrator] Claudia Dale Goldin was born in 1946 in the Bronx.
She was a problem-solver from the beginning.
As a child, she avoided the New York City heat
by spending her summer days playing cards or reading
in air-conditioned department stores.
And while she always knew
she wanted to be a scientist of some kind,
she wasn't always set on economics.
- [Dev] She'll tell stories to me
about when she first went to the Natural History Museum,
when she was living in the Bronx,
and fell in love with mummies
and thought that archeology was going to be her passion.
But then she discovered microbiology,
and she suddenly realized that microscopes uncovered
a whole new world of discovery for her.
It wasn't until she actually went to college at Cornell
that she first got introduced to economics.
- [Claudia] I decided to become an economist
because I took an economics class
from an amazing person named Fred Kahn.
He was so excited about the field of industrial organization
and product markets and regulation
that it was infectious.
And in fact, when I went to graduate school
at the University of Chicago,
I went there to study Industrial Organization.
- [Narrator] Under the mentorship of Bob Fogel,
Claudia studied American Economic History,
particularly the economics of slavery and the post-Civil War South.
She had to travel to some southern states
to gather archival materials for this research.
Goldin didn't approach this trip like a traditional economist.
- [Lawrence] She thought what I should do
is hitchhike between the different cities in the south.
She met somebody from one of the archives
who let her stay at their place,
and when she came back,
her advisor asked her for a list of the receipts and expenses
associated with the trip,
and she had no clue
that you were supposed to actually stay in hotels
and pay for actual travel
and that you could get reimbursements.
But in fact, by actually staying with the archivist
and getting access to archives and knowledge
that you wouldn't have had,
it probably created inroads and understanding
that wouldn't have been possible
if you were going through usual channels.
- [Narrator] She continued to focus on economic history,
exploring such questions
as why the North and South had such different economic outcomes
after the Civil War.
- [Claudia] Then I remember thinking that there were interesting aspects
in terms of child labor and families.
It suddenly occurred to me, the main changes in the labor force
had to do with women.
- [Narrator] She realized
that there was a huge story in U.S. history
that was missing from economist scrutiny
and that was the great evolution of women's labor force participation.
- [Claudia] The women who were working --
from much of the history that I was looking at --
were young, single women.
But then it morphed into studying how it was
that older married women with families joined the workforce.
- [Narrator] Goldin combined deep archival research,
history, and economics
to conduct study after study,
examining how various dimensions
of women's participation in the U.S. labor force
evolved over 200 years.
- [Ilyana] Goldin's best known for her contributions
to the economics agenda.
She sort of pioneers that area.
- [Lawrence] She has been thinking about things no one had known --
like why is it that women's jobs
were much more likely to be paid piece rate.
And men's jobs --
why is money taken away and given to their parents?
The important role for caring for the family
and how that affects the labor market.
She just has a determination to figure out what's true,
to find the new data, to read the historical sources,
to think about what the actual people making decisions.
One of the huge advantages we have as economists,
we can actually read the diaries
of actual people making these decisions
and talk to them and interview them
when we're doing contemporaneous work
or read their inner thoughts.
- [Narrator] As just one example, Goldin's exhaustive research
has led her to identify four phases,
going back to the late 19th century,
that shaped women's role in the U.S. economy.
The first three phases were evolutionary.
While important advances were made through the evolutionary phases,
women also had limited control
over key decisions affecting their employment.
Women in those periods
were more likely to view their working lives as intermittent
and a means to put food on the table.
Then came the quiet revolution, starting in the late 1970s.
Women of the quiet revolution generally viewed their careers
as a significant part of their personal identity
and made their own decisions about their working lives.
Goldin found that this latest phase
was triggered mainly by increased investments in education
and increased availability of contraceptives.
- [Edward] More than any other person,
she has been central in the study of women and work in economics.
She gave it a broad historical sweep.
She tied it to economic theory in a tight way.
Anyone who works on the issue of women and work going forward
will be citing Claudia Goldin and will be influenced by her.
- [Narrator] Working together with Larry Katz,
she's also done critical research about education, technology,
and the extreme dangers of income and inequality.
- [Ilyana] She's among the first to document
what we now think of as a U shape of inequality
over the 20th century.
To this day, economists are still trying to figure out
the determinants of that U shape.
- [Narrator] As the first woman to be offered tenure
in the Harvard Economics Department,
she also takes her role
of mentoring the next generation of economists seriously.
- [Dev] As any graduate student will tell you,
the advisors play a critical role.
It's these personal touches
that make Claudia Goldin such a wonderful advisor --
whether it's walking her dog, Pika, with her,
receiving midnight texts from her that always make me laugh.
- [Ilyana] She's not always serious -- which is, of course, very important
because if someone's constantly serious,
it's just so intimidating as a student.
- [Narrator] In 2014, Goldin started
the Undergraduate Women in Economics Program --
a broad initiative to encourage more female economics majors.
- [Ilyana] When doing my best research,
I am reminded of what I learned from Claudia,
and how research can be fun
how it's a mystery that you want to unravel.
- [Edward] She brings a joy to her research.
We were famously called the "dismal science."
Well, certainly when Claudia Goldin does economics --
it's anything but dismal.
- [Narrator] Want to better understand Goldin
and her contributions to labor economics?
Click here for related materials and practice questions,
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