Claudia Goldin '67

As the gender roles of women and men have increasingly converged, women have made dramatic gains in the labor market. Yet full equality continues to be elusive. What has to change for there to be equality between men and women in the labor market? Scholar Claudia Goldin ’67 will answer the question in a Sesquicentennial talk, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter,” Oct. 23 at 4:30 p.m. in Cornell’s Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.

“Professor Goldin is one of the pre-eminent scholars of gender in the world,” says Francine Blau, the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and professor of economics. “She has penetrating insights to offer on what is necessary to write this last chapter in gender convergence.”

“Claudia Goldin’s work is central to inquiry into economic inequality in the United States,” adds Richard Miller, the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor in Ethics and Public Life and director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Our Sesquicentennial celebrations will be an extremely apt setting for this lecture by a distinguished Cornell alumna, illuminating trends in women’s and men’s work-lives that are of great ethical and personal importance.”

Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her historical work on women in the U.S. economy has been extremely wide-ranging and influential, Miller says. Her most recent work looks at the rise of mass education in the United States and its impact on economic growth and wage inequality, as well as a project on the family and career transitions of male and female graduates of selective universities from the late 1960s to the present.

She is the author and editor of many books, including “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women” and “The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century.” Her most recent book, co-authored with Lawrence Katz, is “The Race Between Education and Technology,” winner of the 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award for the most outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of the arts and sciences.

Goldin received her B.A. from Cornell and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In 2009 she was awarded the Mincer Prize for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics from the Society of Labor Economists. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is president of the American Economic Association.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.