Betsey Stevenson, Columnist

Goldin Took Women’s Careers From Economic Sideshow to Mainstream

Thanks to the perseverance of the Nobel-winning Harvard economist, the female half of the population is no longer seen as irrelevant to the macroeconomy.

October 10, 2023 at 10:00 AM UTC

By Betsey Stevenson

Betsey Stevenson is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. She was on the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and was chief economist at the US Department of Labor.

A pioneer.
Photographer: Carlin Stiehl/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

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Economics is still a male-dominated profession. Among full professors, only 1 out of every 8 is a woman. Among assistant professors, women are a little less than 1 in 3, similar to their share of undergraduate economics majors. It is a field that has struggled to appeal to women and struggled to retain the women who find it appealing.

When Claudia Goldin, who was just awarded the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, studied economics in the 1960s, first as an undergraduate at Cornell and later as a PhD student at the University of Chicago, women were even scarcer. The American Economic Association didn’t start formally publishing the number of females in the profession until 1972, when women made up just 7.2% of new PhDs and 2.4% of full professors.