Goldin's work has helped make the world a better place

The Nobel laureate saw employees as people first and that has made a positive difference

- RAHUL JACOB

In a research paper that Claudia Goldin co-authored years ago, this year's Nobel laureate in Economics documented how pay for women in major US symphony orchestras rose after so-called 'blind' auditions were introduced in the 1980s, where musicians seeking a job performed behind a screen. In a paper just this month, Goldin's keen eye for revealing details prompted her to compare how many references there were in newspapers of the 1960s to equal rights legislation with a count of references to "hot coffee" and "ice cream cones."

Goldin's new paper, titled 'Why Women Won,' documents how prohibitions against sex discrimination were sometimes fortuitously inserted into important civil rights legislation in the early 1960s to give African-Americans equal rights. And in a case of art predicting real-life events and her writing is artistic and moving-she won the Nobel Prize in Economics days after that paper was published, only the third woman to do so.

Removing discrimination against women and minorities boosts economies, lends diversity to workplaces and corrects historical injustices. Often overlooked in our triumphalist narrative on digital inclusion is India's low workforce participation rate for women and how this rules out an East Asian-style development trajectory.