Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin uses ICPSR data to help understand historical wage inequality in the US

On October 9, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel prize in economic sciences to Harvard economic historian and labor economist, Claudia Goldin. Besides being a Nobel laureate, Goldin happens to be an ICPSR data depositor who is the PI or co-PI for at least seven studies in the General Archive. She also actively reuses data from ICPSR to assist with her research, and she has shared replication data in multiple openICPSR projects.

The Academy acknowledged Goldin’s research on the historical underpinnings of the gender earnings gap in the US labor force. Much of this research is reflected in her 2021 book, Career and Family. In it, Goldin provided an historical look at 20th century US women in terms of their education, occupation, and family lives, to investigate the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. She used an extensive collection of data sources to look at various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. One source she used was the Great Aspirations data, which was deposited at ICPSR by James A. Davis in 1984 in the study, Career Plans and Experiences of June 1961, College Graduates (ICPSR 7344). It contains longitudinal survey data from four waves of college students between 1961 and 1968, asking them about their career goals and how those changed. (Goldin then shared via openICPSR updated Stata formats of the data files, making them easier to reuse.) In the book, she also included a secondary analysis of restricted-use data containing detailed physician specialties and income from five waves of studies in the Community Tracking Study Series, which is distributed by the Health & Medical Care Archive. After her comprehensive look at multiple indicators in Career and Family, Goldin found that despite years of progress in women’s rights and their increased access to a broad array of career opportunities, the wage gap still exists in some part due to a work culture and economy that is bogged down by old structures. The highest paying jobs are still “greedy” in that they demand long hours and near constant availability. In dual career couples, college educated women who are mothers often are the ones who pursue lower paying jobs in order to have more flexible hours. Along with continuing to change norms around fatherhood and work-life balance, to close the gender pay gap, Goldin argued that high-paying work must become more flexible.

Among the studies Goldin has deposited at ICPSR, several focus on historical data about the US labor force. Four of those studies are part of the Woman and Child Wage Earners Series, which use as their main data source the US Senate Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the US in 19 Volumes, published in 1910. The data in each are derived from the Report’s data from the year 1907, describing women working away from their families in large cities, as well as women and children working at home or in textile mills and selected industries in several locations, including New York City. The 1915 Iowa State Census Project (ICPSR 28501), distributed by Data Sharing for Demographic Research, is another unique data collection that Goldin deposited, along with Lawrence Katz. They digitized a 7.8% sample of Iowa’s historical state census data from 1915, which they stratified to represent both urban and rural residents. This state census was the first in the United States to include information on education and income prior to the United States Federal Census of 1940. In addition to the Goldin data in the study catalog, the ICPSR Bibliography currently contains multiple publications authored by her, which use data held at ICPSR.