Women now hold many of the jobs controlling the world’s largest economy — and they’re trying to fix it.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and trade czar Katherine Tai hold top jobs in US President Joe Biden’s administration and many of his economic advisers are also women, as are nearly 48 percent of his confirmed cabinet-level officials. This sea change may already be affecting economic policy — a new $2.3 trillion spending plan introduced by Biden last week includes $400 billion to fund the “care economy,” supporting home- and community-based jobs taking care of kids and seniors, work normally done by women that has mostly gone unacknowledged in years past.The plan also has hundreds of billions of dollars more to fix racial and rural-urban inequalities that were created in part by past economic, trade and labor policies.
Yellen says the focus on “human infrastructure,” and the earlier $1.9 trillion rescue bill should result in significant improvements for women, whose share of the workforce had hit 40-year lows even before the crisis, and for everyone else as well.
“In the end, it might be that this bill makes 80 years of history: it begins to fix the structural problems that have plagued our economy for the past four decades,” she wrote on Twitter, adding, “This is just the start for us.”
Women leaders can bring fresh perspective to economic policy, experts say.
“When you’re different from the rest of the group, you often see things differently,” said Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire.”
“You tend to be more open to different solutions,” she said, and that is what the situation demands. “We’re in a moment of enormous crisis. We need new ways of thinking.”
Source:dawn.com
Sunday, May 10, 2026
