When she was sworn in earlier this year as the 78th Secretary of the Treasury, American economist and educator Janet Yellen became the first woman to head the U.S. Treasury Department. Her five-decade career has been truly remarkable—and she's undoubtedly notched a few historic firsts during her time in a male-dominated sector.
Born into a middle-class family in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, she graduated summa cum laude with an economics degree from Brown University in 1967 before receiving her PhD in economics from Yale University four years later.
Yellen first focused on an academic career. She became a professor at several prestigious universities including Harvard and Berkeley, but also briefly worked for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as an economist. She devoted much of her time to studying issues involving wages and unemployment.
She eventually found her way into the highest economic offices in the United States. Yellen served as chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and head of the Federal Reserve System, one of the most powerful central banks in the world, where she surely blazed a trail by becoming the first woman to do so.
Yellen's early 2021 appointment as U.S. Treasury Secretary makes her the first person to ever hold all three of the top economic posts in the Federal Government. She now plans to help Americans recover from COVID-19 pandemic losses and rebuild a prosperous economy.
Not only is she an advocate for underrepresented Americans with her policy contributions, but she has also broken many gender ceilings as a woman in the finance industry and repeatedly advocated for increased representation of women.
“Despite this progress, evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals,” Yellen once said. “If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.”
Given her career path and accomplishments, it comes as no surprise that Yellen has been listed by numerous publications as one of the most powerful women in the world. She's become a beacon of inspiration for many people, particularly young women with ambitions in the world of economics.