WILLIAM Shakespeare’s 1597 comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost tells the story of four Frenchmen as they navigate the tension between commitment to intellectual development and the quest for domestic bliss. Some four centuries later, Harvard economist Claudia Goldin reimagined the tale from the vantage point of American women balancing career and family. Now, Goldin’s profound insights into women’s labour-market outcomes have won her a Nobel Prize in economics.

Goldin’s achievement is notable not only because she works in an overwhelmingly male-dominated discipline – she is only the third woman in history to win the economics Nobel, and the first to win it solo – but also because her scholarship focuses squarely on gender. The issues Goldin researches – women’s labour-force participation and, specifically, the gender pay gap – are typically siloed within feminist economics and marginalised in the field.

Goldin, who positions herself as an “economist-detective”, has cracked a number of cases, but as the Nobel Committee noted, three stand out.