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.”