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?"
- [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 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 you're working with economic history,
when you can't just download a cleaned-up dataset.
You really have to go searching open, dusty boxes
and look under tocks.
- [Lawrence] She is the consummate, economic historian.
She has been the innovator and pioneer
on bringing economical 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 on work on understanding inequality.
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.
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 suddently 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.
I decidede 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.
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.
She thought what I should do is hitchhike between the different cities in the south.
She met somebody in 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,
she had no clue that you were supposed to actually stay in hotels and pay for actual travel,
and you could get reimbursements.
By actually staying with the archivists and getting access to archives
and knowledge that you wouldn't have had,
it probably created [ ] and understanding that wouldn't have been possible
if you were going through usual channels.