By John Lin, Associate Magazine Editor, Harvard Crimson, 26 January 2024
Henry Lee Professor of Economics Claudia D. Goldin speaks with Fifteen Minutes about her Nobel Prize, gender gaps in economics, and the Barbie movie.…
FM: You just got back from the Nobel Prize ceremony about a month ago. Could you describe that experience?
It was a combination of being exhilarating, exhausting, and at the same time, there was a certain amount of humor that I always find in everything in life. As I said, it was a tremendous amount: Every second of my day for eight days was taken up.
FM: What was the highlight from the week?
Let me just back up a bit: on October 9, when I was called at 4:30 in the morning, and told that I had 90 minutes to prepare for a press conference. Then, I had this huge amount of emails and calls. I learned something that stayed with me and was there in Stockholm as well, which is that this wasn’t just my prize. This was a prize that was felt deeply by a very large fraction of the world’s population, that many women felt “I am heard, I understood.” People doing work on women and gender, people doing work and economic history felt “My work is validated; findings that I have put out are vindicated. I am emboldened.” And that stayed.
When I was in Stockholm, I spoke more times than the other laureates. I had seven different talks to give — some long and some were extremely short. For each one of them, I felt this sense of relief, a sense that a group of people were breathing out, that they were saying, “I have been heard.”
FM: Something I find fascinating about your career path is your initial interest in microbiology and archaeology. And could you talk a little bit about what caused you to kind of move away from the life sciences and into economics?
I came from a family of a mother and a father who, I got the sense from them that being a scientist was the most important thing that you could do. At some point in junior high school, I read Paul de Kruif’s book “Microbe Hunters.” The notion of being a detective and figuring out what causes various diseases was very exciting to me, but that was a moment of enormous change in the field of microbiology. As the findings of Crick and Watson are getting absorbed and expanded, I don’t think that the programs in microbiology and bacteriology in many universities were up to the task.…
Read more at the Harvard Crimson