Nobel Economics Prize

Harvard University's Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences yesterday for her pioneering work in women's labor history. She is the third woman to receive the honor in the award's 54-year history and the first to do so individually.

The 77-year-old labor economist and economic historian has led the field for decades with positions at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard—where she became the first woman in the economics department to receive tenure. For decades, she has directed groups at the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit think tank, and has held stints as president of both the American Economic Association and the Economic History Association.

Her research has focused on the historical wage disparities between men and women (listen here). Previously, differences in education and occupation explained the gap, but Goldin found that in recent decades, pay differences emerged in the years after a woman had her first child. Today, women in the US earn roughly 80% of what men make.