Claudia Goldin has been paving the path for women in economics, academics, and the workforce since 1973. After receiving her PhD in industrial organization and labor economics from the University of Chicago, she went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Princeton, before achieving tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, she joined the economics department at Harvard, becoming the first woman to ever be offered tenure in that department.
Goldin is the former president of both the American Economic Association and the Economic History Association. For almost thirty years, she was the director of development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. This past October, Godin smashed the glass ceiling when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her fifty years of groundbreaking research on the gender pay gap and women’s labor market outcomes. She is only the third woman to win the award, and the first to win it for solo work.
