Axios, October 2023
Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, best known for her work on women in the labor market, was awarded the Nobel in economics Monday, the first woman to win the prize solo.
Why it matters: This isn’t just a win for Goldin, it’s a victory for the study of women in economics — a long-overlooked area of research that Goldin legitimized and opened up to a generation of scholars.
- Goldin’s win “lifts up gender studies, lifts up female economists, and lifts up women’s lived experiences across the world,” Alicia Modestino, who studied under Goldin at Harvard, tells Axios.
- “It just feels really, really big,” says Modestino, who’s now an associate professor of economics at Northeastern University, and considers Goldin a mentor. “I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been moved to tears today.”
Catch up fast: Goldin was the first tenured woman economist at Harvard and took on the subject of women in the labor market at a time when much of the field’s empirical analysis ignored women entirely.
