Pinelopi Goldberg, Economics

As an economics graduate student at Stanford University, Pinelopi Goldberg was one of only three women in a class of twenty-two. When she began to apply for academic positions in the early nineties, she was surprised to find that hiring committees described her demeanor as “arrogant and dismissive,” which ran counter to Goldberg’s own perception of herself. Though she was unaware at the time of how common this kind of feedback was for female economists, she eventually learned that “…this is an issue that many women face. Either you’re [called] ‘insecure’ when you try to be nice and accommodate people’s comments, or you’re considered to be too ‘arrogant’ and too ‘aggressive.’ It’s really hard to find a middle ground between these extremes.”

Goldberg came to Yale in 2001 and was the first woman to hold tenure in the Economics department. Today, only 14.5% of full professors at PhD-granting institutions are women. Goldberg says that the gender imbalance in economics has been a problem for a long time, but that “there was always talk, [but] no action.” In the past five years or so, she says, things have begun to change, for women in economics as well as women working in all areas of the workforce. The most prevalent kinds of gender bias in an academic space these days involve women’s contributions to a discussion being ignored (even in virtual meetings), or women’s ideas being dismissed. These things are less overt than sexism in the past and this makes them “hard to address” in many ways. Goldberg is hopeful, however, that change is coming: “There is a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence that supports this view that there are many little, subtle things that still make the environment challenging for women,” she says. “I think the positive development is that there is an explicit effort these days to address all these concerns and to do better by women. I’m quite optimistic about the future.”

Goldberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recently stepped down from the position of Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. She is past editor of the American Economic Review and President-elect of the Econometric Society. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and is a winner of the Bodossaki Prize in Social Sciences. Her recent work before the COVID-19 pandemic focused on economics in developing countries, on workers in the informal sector and women’s economic opportunities. Since March, she has been thinking about the economic ramifications of the pandemic, which she describes as the “biggest issue we [have faced] since World War II.” She is especially focused on policy recommendations for developing countries, which face unique challenges in relation to this crisis.

Selected works of Pinelopi Goldberg

  • “Distributional effects of globalization in developing countries,” with N. Pavcnik, Journal of Economic Literature, 45(1), Mar. 2007, pp. 39-82.
  • “Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Quinolones in India,” with S. Chaudhuri and P. Jia, American Economic Review, Dec. 2006, pp. 1477-1513.

Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics