Last month, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, was awarded the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic sciences, honored for her decades of research on the role of women in the labor economy and the gender wage gap.
Five decades ago, Goldin was a twentysomething faculty member at UW-Madison, teaching students about economics and building the first blocks of what would become a legendary career.
"As a labor economist myself, I have learned a tremendous amount from Professor Goldin's seminal work,” says current department chair Christopher Taber. “As a department we are both proud and humbled by our early contribution to her career."
Goldin was only briefly a member of the Department of Economics faculty, arriving in 1971 as an assistant professor and departing in 1974 to accept an offer at Princeton University. But she made a definite impression on her colleagues in the department.
“She was a stimulating young woman, and we were most disappointed when she decided to leave,” says W. Lee Hansen, an emeritus professor of economics who was teaching in the department in the 1970s.
Lau Christensen was also an associate professor in the department during Goldin’s tenure.
“It was a period where the state was still supporting UW-Madison very well,” recalls Christensen, who taught econometrics and applied microeconomics for 20 years. “There were a bunch of highly regarded new assistant professors coming in every year. Claudia was part of that group, and she was clearly very bright and ambitious. Even though she was only here for three years, she was a very active participant in the department.”
Christensen, who today serves on the board of advisors for both the Department of Economics and the Mead-Witter School of Music, got to know Goldin outside the department. In 1971, he went on a two-year leave from teaching to take roles in the U.S Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Goldin rented and stayed in his house for one of those years.
“I didn't really interact much with her professionally, but I know she was active and well thought of in the department.”
Christensen co-founded a Madison-based consulting company, Laurits R. Christensen and Associates Inc., in 1981. He notes that while it has taken several decades for women to have a significant presence in economics as a profession, the UW-Madison Department of Economics has actively recruited female professors for many decades.
“It's just wonderful to see Claudia succeed to the point where she receives this recognition,” Christensen says.
Goldin’s career research highlights are copious. She’s known for connecting the spike in women entering the labor force in the late 1960s with states allowing oral contraception for single and younger women, as well as an increase in women attending college. More recently, her work has focused on why men and women choose occupations, and how the concept of the “greedy job”— a job that demands excessive hours and energy — often ends up forcing women to take lower-paying jobs or drop out of the workforce altogether.