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Professor Claudia Goldin, a trailblazing economist at Harvard University, on Monday was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work exploring the role of women in the labor market.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said the prize honors Goldin’s work in creating “the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries.”

Goldin is the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, which has been awarded to 90 men.

Despite decades of progress, women remain underrepresented in the workforce and earn less than their male counterparts. Goldin’s analysis of more than 200 years of U.S. labor force data shows how employment rates and the gender wage gap depend not just on the economy but also on evolving social norms related to women’s education and roles in the home and family.

Goldin, 77, who was asleep at her Cambridge, Mass., home when the committee called early Monday morning to notify her of the prize, said the recognition underscores the importance of examining not just what’s happening in today’s economy, but also how history has played a role in shaping current trends.

“The fact is, the past is always with us and it impacts what we’re able to do,” she said in an interview. “And that’s important when you’re looking at the shift of women from the home into the economic marketplace.”

Goldin’s work pushes back against long-held notions that a strong economy and technological advancements would be enough to pull women into the workforce. Her research found that a large share of married women — nearly 60 percent — were in the workforce in the 1790s, when much of the U.S. economy was built on agriculture. But women’s labor force participation declined dramatically in the 1800s with the rise of industrialization, which made it difficult for them to juggle outside work with domestic responsibilities.

By the early 1900s, though, women began returning to the workforce, thanks to a shift to service-sector work and more educational opportunities. But major barriers remain, including a lack of accessible and affordable child care.

“One thing about Claudia: She has always seen the richness of people’s lives and the decisions they make,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and former chief economist at the Labor Department, who counted Goldin among her thesis advisers at Harvard. “The men before her studied work and rarely gave a thought to how the actual food got on the table, clothes on the backs and the children raised.”

Among Goldin’s most noteworthy findings was that access to the birth-control pill, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, played <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624453/Goldin_PowerPill.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y" target=_blank>a pivotal role</a> in increasing college enrollment among women.

Goldin’s research also explores the reasons for stubborn wage gaps between men and women, including pay discrimination and parenthood. Although in the past, the gender pay gap was mostly related to differences in education levels and career choices, Goldin has shown that pay inequities persist among men and women in the same jobs. Women, she found, take an immediate hit to their earnings after the birth of their first child, when many are forced to scale back their hours or forgo advancement opportunities because they handle the bulk of child care.

Goldin’s own career trajectory, as the first woman to become a tenured economics professor at Harvard, has broken gender barriers and helped encourage a new wave of women in the field.

Cecilia Rouse, former chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, credits Goldin, whom she first met while a student at Harvard, with illustrating the myriad challenges women face in entering the workforce.

In <a href="https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.90.4.715" target=_blank>a 2000 paper</a>, Goldin and Rouse found the percentage of women in the country’s top symphony orchestras increased significantly after they switched to “blind” auditions in which candidates’ identities were concealed by physical screens during tryouts. “Female musicians, it can be convincingly argued, have historically faced considerable discrimination,” the authors wrote.

“She’s been a trailblazer, both personally — being a female in a very male-dominated field — but also in recognizing that it takes a mosaic to understand the world,” said Rouse, the incoming president of the Brookings Institution. “Claudia’s body of work is made up of puzzle pieces that, when put together, help us understand the role of women in the labor market and at home.”

The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to two other women in its 54-year history: Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University Bloomington (in 2009) and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in 2019).

Last year’s prize was awarded to former Federal Reserve chair Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip H. Dybvig of Washington University in St. Louis, who won for their work on banks and financial crises.

<i>David J. Lynch contributed to this report</i>

Gerald Loeb Award, Beat Reporting, 2021

Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism

Abha Bhattarai is the economics correspondent for The Washington Post. She previously covered retail for the publication.

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Economics Nobel Prize awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women in labor market

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