Monday morning, Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin got the call informing her that she had won this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. Her research has “advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes,” according to the prize committee.

Much of Goldin’s work focuses on the gender wage gap and the reasons behind it. She’s written, edited and co-authored books, plus dozens of research papers on the topic in her decades in the field.

In fact, Claudia Goldin may be one of economics’ greatest explainers.

“She can explain why the earnings gap hardly closed for much of the 1900s,” said Nobel committee member Randi Hjalmarsson, speaking at Monday’s announcement of the prize, describing the work of the economic historian and labor economist. “She can explain why the gender gap in earnings suddenly started to close in the 1980s. And she can explain why the earnings gap has stopped closing today,” she said.

She’s even explained how the pandemic affected the earnings gap.

Some of Goldin’s more recent research looked deep into the data of the economic impact of COVID-19 and found it had a greater impact on women’s employment and labor force participation than men.

Impacts that persist, according to Sari Kerr at Wellesley College, who co-authored a working paper with Goldin on women in the workforce and the career gap.

“We still have the perpetual question of how to afford day care, child care and elder care,” Kerr said. “And since that care burden is so unevenly distributed still between men and women, and how to manage that are big questions, certainly.”

Another big topic that Goldin has been working on for decades is another gender gap: The relatively small number of women economists.

Goldin has spearheaded several efforts to address the root causes of that problem and has a working paper on the topic with Tatyana Avilova, who teaches economics at Bowdoin College and works with Goldin on a project called the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge.

“I do want to say that Claudia deserves this award even more for the kind of mentoring and advising that she has done not just for me, but for generations of women and economics,” Avilova said.

Like the gender wage gap, the women in economics disparity seems to be stubbornly large and stuck, and in need of more research in economics to come up with long-term solutions.