Economist Takes a Rational Approach

While the public spotlight was focused on University President Lawrence H. Summers’ remarks, one female economist was quietly attempting to place the current debate about the gender gap in various academic and career fields into a larger historical context.

Indeed, Lee Professor of Economics Claudia Goldin, who has spent much of her career as a scholar-economist examining the roots of women’s roles in the economy, urged more dispassionate and intensive analysis of gender disparities in academia during the fallout from Summers’ speech.

What Goldin—who serves as the director of the Program on the Development of the American Economy at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)—says the misrepresentation in the national media frenzy of Summers’ remarks about women in the science at the Jan. 14 NBER conference prompted her to emerge from her long “non-active” approach to University affairs to become a vocal supporter of Summers.

“I was there. I know what he said. I know he was being incorrectly represented,” says Goldin, who has served as president of the Economic History Association and vice-president of the American Economic Association.

In response to the torrent of criticism from media and fellow faculty members, Goldin, with Allison Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz, wrote a January op-ed in The Boston Globe defending Summers’ NBER remarks.

Goldin also circulated a letter in February—co-written with Professor of Economics David I. Laibson ’88—among tenured Faculty expressing confidence in Summers.

The letter, eventually signed by 186 professors, articulated their stance that Summers’ “decisions are guided by a fundamental commitment to the ideals of scholarship and teaching that define this institution.”

‘A DROP IN THE BUCKET’

Goldin says that the public controversy triggered by Summers’ remarks has suffered from a lack of attention to and analysis of long-term historical trends.

“Economics has always been a historical discipline. Any economist who will say to you, ‘I’m going to be telling you about what happened last week,’ you just shouldn’t listen to, because what happened last week could just be a transitory blip,” Goldin says.

Goldin instead adamantly emphasizes the importance of using historical analysis in economics, a discipline often known for its tools of empirical analysis and neoclassical models.

Goldin, whose work was cited in Summers’ controversial talk, has earned high praise from her colleagues at Harvard.

“She’s a superb economic historian for doing American economic history,” says Ascherman Professor of Economics Richard B. Freeman. “She’s probably the leading person in the world. That’s my view.”

And despite her emphasis on historical analysis, Goldin says economic models are still crucial to her research as an economic historian.

But Goldin is not strictly quantitative. “Your world isn’t driven by a model,” she says. “Your world is revealed and is illuminated by a model. A model is something you carry around in your head as a structure. This isn’t a strait jacket.”

Goldin, who received her B.A. from Cornell in 1967 and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972, says that in her research as an economic historian, she found an abiding interest in the major changes to the female labor force that have taken place through the course of American history.

“Women’s economic role appeared to be rapidly changing. Yet I quickly came to realize that change was not as precipitous or as recent as most thought,” says Goldin, whose research includes includes a 1990 book “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women.”

In light of the complex historical roots behind women’s roles in the labor force, the national media’s intense focus on Summers’ remarks and very recent trends is overly simplistic, Goldin says.

“What happened with President Summers is a drop in the bucket,” she says.

DRAWN INTO THE DEBATE

While Goldin says she does not consider “innate” differences between men and women a satisfactory explanation for the underrepresentation of women in various careers and academic fields, the point seems to be moot—Goldin argues that Summers was not talking about “innate” differences at all in his NBER remarks.

“People may hate him for various reasons but it would be good if they at least looked at the transcripts and quoted him properly,” says Goldin.

Goldin acknowledges that one reason why economists in particular have rallied behind Summers is that he is “a member of our tribe” and that “he’s using analysis that we can understand,” but she says that Summers cited well-established data about variance in high school students’ math test scores that has been used in “countless scholarly papers.”

She says that his economic analysis was sound and nuanced, if not communicated in a language that would be well-received by his audience.

“The point is what is it that you’re saying, but not how it is that you’re saying it,” Goldin says.

“He put in words what I think about all the time, and he put them in a better-organized talk than I could ever give. It was completely extemporaneous,” she adds. “But there was nothing new. There was nothing new.”

HARVARD AND FEMALE FACULTY

Goldin’s support of Summers does not mean, however, that she sees no problem in female hiring. In recent months, she has emphasized the University’s need to conduct research into the long-term trends of the representation of women in its Faculty and to make a sustained effort to identify and address challenges faced by female academics.

“I think that universities and other employees and employees should make life easier so that they have happier workers with families,” Goldin says.

Spurred by their previous research and urged by Summers, who met with the pair last summer, Goldin and Katz have started a project to study the career paths of thousands of Harvard graduates to track and explain any gender gaps in various career fields.

Goldin, in collaboration with Katz, is currently researching the history of interactions between educational institutions and the wider economy in America, and how the benefits of economic outcomes and growth are distributed.

“One would think that women who are in more selective institutions would have fewer constraints, but we’ll see,” Goldin says of her research.

Goldin asserts that Summers has long been aware of the many issues faced by female professors and sought to address them.

“This is something that has concerned him deeply before he became president of Harvard. Larry knows all about this. He wasn’t born yesterday,” says Goldin, adding that Summers solicited her and other faculty members’ views on women faculty and tenure in May 2004.

There has been a much publicized decline in the number of Faculty tenure offers to women, which dropped last year to 12.5 percent—four out of 32—from 36 percent three years ago.

The University’s commitment to recruit female faculty may be there, but finding actual policies that ultimately work require intensive, long-term research, Goldin says.

“If you find individuals who are extraordinary and you know their work and you know their minds, well, you could hasten the tenure process for a long list of people—not just for women, but men,” says Goldin, who says that a policy of delaying the date at which women faculty come up for tenure so that they can start families may actually make it difficult for them to ever be tenured.

“The real difficulty is exactly what to do,” Goldin says. “And sometimes well-intentioned policies go awry.”

—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.