How the pill smashed early marriage and boosted women’s rise up the corporate ladder — but still wasn’t enough to make women’s pay equal to men’s

(Credit: Lauren Owens Lambert / AFP)

Before she was a Nobel laureate, an advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, or the head of the American Economic Association, Claudia Goldin found economics in some unusual places. What, she asked in an early research paper, explained the rise in female musicians in symphony orchestras in 1980? What have pharmacists figured out that gives the profession its remarkably equal gender split? And how did a Vietnam-era change in U.S. law supercharge women’s enrollment in law school? 

All these questions tie into Goldin’s career focus—women’s participation in the workforce and the barriers to gender equality, for which she received the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday.