Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences awarded to Claudia Goldin

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded Monday to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor, for advancing the world’s understanding of women’s progress in the workforce.

She is the third woman to have won the economics Nobel, which was first awarded in 1969, and the first one to be honored with it solo rather than sharing in the prize.

Goldin, 77, has long been a trailblazer in the field — she was the first woman to be offered tenure in Harvard’s economics department, in 1989. Her wide-ranging work has delved into the causes of the gender wage gap, the evolution of women’s participation in the job market over the past 200 years, and the implications for the future of the labor force.

The Nobel committee announced the award in Stockholm, praising Goldin for her research on female employment, which showed that employment among married women decreased in the 1800s, as the economy moved away from agriculture and toward industry. Women’s participation then increased in the 1900s, as the service sector began to expand as a part of the economy.

Goldin has described the 1970s in particular as a “revolutionary” period in which women in the United States began to marry later, take strides in higher education, and make major progress in the labor market.

Goldin has also illustrated how the process of closing the gender wage gap has been uneven over the course of history. Recently, progress in closing it has been halting: Today, women in the United States make a little over 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Goldin said in an interview that she hoped people would take away from her work how important long-term changes are to understanding the labor market.

“We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity,” she said. While there has been “monumental progressive change, at the same time there are important differences,” which often tie back to women doing more work in the home.

Goldin has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. She often co-authors papers with her husband, Lawrence Katz, a fellow Harvard University economist.

Claudia Olivetti of Dartmouth, a co-author of Goldin’s, said Goldin’s work has “shaped much of the current research on women and labor markets.”

Goldin has also been an important mentor to many women entering the field of economics, she said.