The Intellectual Traditions of Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin
Sarah F. Small
Assistant Professor, University of Utah Economics Department
Monetary Policy Institute Blog #105
“This year’s Nobel win begs the question: does the economics discipline finally care about gender equality? It seems that the answer is yes, but perhaps only if it is presented in an intellectual tradition comfortable to the mainstream.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.” In other words, a gender economist has won the Nobel prize in economics.
From one of her earliest books, Understanding the Gender Gap, to her most recent book, Career and Family, Claudia Goldin has been generally focused on the labor outcomes of women in the United States throughout history, rarely straying to different geographies and often focusing on the experiences of well-educated white women (see my book review). Among those already writing about Goldin’s Nobel win, a major criticism has been that Goldin primarily focuses on the United States and on that of white women (Abraham and Kesar). Given her own experiences as a college-educated white woman in the United States, historians of thought using a lens of standpoint epistemology will not be surprised (see Harding). However, to Goldin’s credit, this is not representative of Goldin’s entire body of work.
For instance, her early career work was focused on racial elements of U.S. economic history: from her doctoral thesis slavery in the antebellum South (1972), and Black and white women’s labor force participation in the 1870s and 1880s (1977), to the costs of the Civil War (1975). Much of this research took place during or shortly after Goldin earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1972: an era in which literature on the economics of discrimination was growing, and much of it was in conflict with that of her mentor, Gary Becker (see Small). Goldin jumped on the bandwagon by applying her expertise in economic history, as developed under Robert Fogel and during her time studying history at Cornell as an undergraduate (1999).
In the Nobel announcement specifically, she is credited with establishing an understanding of the U-shaped curve of women’s labor force participation. Namely, she found that the labor force participation of women in the United States decreased during the economic transition from an agrarian to industrial society, but then started to increase again with the growth of the service sector (Goldin 1995). Indeed, her archival efforts in this realm are colossal, but the theory was not necessarily developed by Goldin (1995). Goldin (1995) herself credits Ester Boserup (1970), and many others were similarly writing on the relationship between development and women’s labor force participation (for instance, Ward and Pampel (l985), Nuss and Majka (1983), Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos (1989), and Ferber and Berg (1991)). In fact, pioneering feminist macroeconomist Nilüfer Çagatay and her coauthor Sule Özler published research in the same year as Goldin examining a U-shaped curve across several counties at different stages of development.
Çagatay and Özler (1995) highlight that Goldin’s (1995) novelty in this realm is that she used a choice-theoretic framework, which one may surmise was inherited from her training under Gary Becker at the University of Chicago. Indeed, her (1995) household choice theoretical framing is similar to Becker’s (1981) Treatise, but luckily lacks many of the assumptions about sex-based human capital and paternal altruism presented by Becker.
Goldin admits that she began to stray from Becker’s mentorship in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In her autobiographical piece, ‘The Economist as Detective’, she indicated that while she was writing Understanding the Gender Gap (1990), she “began by working within the accepted framework of female labor supply, pioneered by Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker. The framework, however, had to be bent to fit the historical reality” She went on to say, “As I wrote the book I began to ‘question authority’ much more. The book still bears the strong imprint of a neoclassical economist, but it is also a considerably more nuanced piece of work than I had originally intended (Goldin 1999, p. 12).”
Feminist economist Nancy Folbre noticed Goldin’s newfound tendency to question her conventional Beckarian training in the text. In a piece honoring the intellectual contributions of feminist economist Barbara Bergmann, Folbre noted that Bergmann’s new institutionalist economic approaches had penetrated Goldin’s thinking. More specifically, Folbre (1998, p. 162) wrote, “In Understanding the Gender Gap, published in 1990, Claudia Goldin amends her otherwise conventional human capital approach with a Bergmannesque discussion of the impact of the marriage bars, rules widely enforced against the employment of married women between the 1920s and the 1940s.”
Goldin’s deviance from Becker is much more apparent in her most recent book Career and Family (Goldin 2021). Goldin still refers to her Chicago School roots (mentioning Hazel Kyrk several times in her analysis), but the entirety of the text is much more institutionalist in its framing and her continued dependence on the term to ‘greedy jobs’ indicates a clear deviation from the conventional Chicago School approach as characterized by Medema (2023). She also has clearly learned from feminist epistemologists and economists (including Nelson 1995): Goldin (2021) thoughtfully placed herself in the book. She described her background and perspectives rather than remaining a faceless or ‘impartial’ narrator, which helps readers understand why she is studying question relating to women, higher education, and employment in the United States.
This year’s Nobel win begs the question: does the economics discipline finally care about gender equality? It seems that the answer is yes, but perhaps only if it is presented in an intellectual tradition comfortable to the mainstream. Goldin comes from a long line of Nobel winners [Simon Kuznets (1971 winner) advised Robert W. Fogel (1993 winner) who advised Goldin] and still does not align herself with the more radical roots of feminist economics. Namely, despite interacting with feminist theories, she largely avoids robust discussions of power, patriarchy, and social provisioning — the bread and butter of feminist economics. Indeed, Espinel and Betancourt (2022) place Goldin firmly in the camp of mainstream gender economists as opposed to heterodox feminist economists. Still, this award and other signs of gender mainstreaming across economic literature and policy (Small and Braunstein, forthcoming; Rubery 2005) are worthy of celebration. Goldin has undoubtedly made great contributions to economics through her scholarship and mentoring and has artfully woven some feminist perspectives into her gripping and rigorous work. Her Nobel win gives reason for optimism.
References:
Small, S.F. and Braunstein, E. (forthcoming). “Has the Feminist Economics Intellectual Project Lost its Way? An Analysis of the Journal’s Evolution.” Feminist Economics.
