Professor Goldin organized about two centuries of U.S. data and showed that women’s labor-force participation follows a distinctive U-shaped curve. It was high in the late eighteenth century when farming dominated, fell during the Industrial Revolution as home and workplace separated, and rose again in the twentieth century with more schooling, a growing service sector, and the birth-control pill. Nevertheless, the gender wage gap persisted; she demonstrated that the main driver is the motherhood penalty—the slower pay growth after childbirth. She also uncovered the historical existence of marriage bars that forced married women to quit teaching and clerical jobs, breaking their career paths. Her findings show that policies promoting equal opportunity raise economic efficiency and have influenced labor-market reforms around the world.

Goldin combines economic history with labor economics, re-coding diverse primary sources—censuses, manufacturing ledgers, and time-use surveys from the late eighteenth century onward—to build unique longitudinal datasets. She dynamically analyzes how industrial structure, schooling, institutions, and technological change shape female labor supply and quantifies the long-run U-shaped path. Linking 1930s marriage-bar legislation to labor records, she employs difference-in-differences designs to estimate how job bans reduced the stock of skilled female workers. Using cross-state variation in the legal access to oral contraceptives as a natural experiment, she causally shows that the pill shifted age at marriage, college majors, and career investment. Recent work with MBA panels measures the sharp post-birth divergence in earnings—the motherhood penalty—and argues that the lack of flexible full-time jobs is the key mechanism. Collectively, her research introduces data-driven rigor into gender-gap studies and offers actionable insights for labor-market institutions.

Goldin’s core contribution is the reconstruction of previously unobservable female labor-supply series and the causal identification of gender differentials. Using IPUMS micro-censuses, manufacturing censuses, and Philadelphia probate records, she corrects wife-occupation misclassification and removes attendant estimation bias. Her marriage-bar study exploits state-year roll-outs and repeals in a difference-in-differences framework to measure impacts on skilled labor supply and wage structures. The pill work leverages cross-state age-of-majority variation as an exogenous shift, employing a Card–Krueger-style natural experiment to estimate effects on human-capital investment. She integrates Oaxaca–Blinder and Gelbach decompositions within cohort dynamic models to separate discrimination from selection over time. Joint work with Bertrand and Katz applies event-study methods on administrative microdata to map the motherhood penalty’s dynamics, revealing nonlinear returns to hours worked in tournament wage environments and thereby bridging labor economics with economic history.