Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a black student studying economics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, said she would never have entered the field if she hadn’t met Lisa Cook.
In 2017, Opoku-Agyeman, then a math student with little familiarity with economics, attended a seminar led by Cook, also Black, who was an economics professor at Michigan State University at the time.
“She was wonderful,” Opoku-Agyeman told ABC News. “I walked up to her and said, ‘Hey, can you be my mentor?'”
After graduating, Opoku-Agyeman spent a summer studying at Michigan State University, where Cook’s relationship deepened from a formal mentorship to a friendship.
“She was watching over me in this room,” Opoku-Agyeman said. “I don’t think I would be here if she didn’t take me under her wing and guide me through some of the toughest challenges.”
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In May, Cook became governor of the Federal Reserve, becoming the first black woman to hold that key position, helping to shape central bank policy at a high-stakes moment when policymakers are trying to bring inflation down without triggering a recession trigger.
She is one in a series of women recently promoted to senior leadership positions in US economic policy, including last month’s appointment of Lael Brainard as chair of the National Economic Council.
The rise of women at the forefront of economics shows how far the profession has come from an earlier era when few women entered the field, economists told ABC News.
However, women still make up a fraction of the students in the subject who ultimately set the course for the professional ranks; and a severe shortage of minority women remains a serious problem, they said.
Esther George, the first woman to become President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve and who stepped down in January, told ABC News that the current group of women at the helm of economic policy is a major achievement, but further progress is expected.
“It’s great,” she said, later adding, “We always look at who graduates from school with a PhD in Economics and immediately realize there are fewer women, even fewer people of color. Really requires thinking about why that is.”
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Overall, two of the top three economic policy posts in the Biden administration are currently occupied by women, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
This year, a record number of women sit on the boards of the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional banks, a Reuters analysis showed last month. Of the 108 seats on the 12 Fed bank boards, 44% are women, the analysis showed.
By contrast, women hold 28% of board seats in the Russell 3000 index of public companies, according to a September report by the advocacy group 50/50 Women on Boards, based on data from research firm Equilar.
The rise of women at the top of economic policy has coincided with an increased focus on gender diversity at key institutions like the Federal Reserve, a shift that has been driven in large part by women, economists said.
For example, George, the former president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, helped female colleagues advance their careers by hosting a prestigious three-day annual symposium on central bank policy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
In 2011, George formed a group called “Women of Jackson Hole” aimed at increasing the representation of women attendees and speakers at the conference.
When she started the initiative, women made up a handful of conference attendees, George said. Last year, almost 30 percent of the symposium attendees and more than 40 percent of the speakers were women, the symposium said.
“In the beginning, we women could all sit five around a table,” George said. “When I left, we had an entire terrace.”
“At one point you realize, and that was true for me: I can’t solve everything, but I should solve what I can.”
Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at Stony Brook University and former economics adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, welcomed the rise of women to the top of the field but stressed the importance of evaluating them by how they do their jobs.
“It’s certainly affirming and overdue, and you love watching women succeed in climbing the ranks,” Kelton told ABC News. “But it’s also important who these people are and what they’re going to fight for and how they understand how the economy works.”
Despite advances in women’s representation at the top of the field, men far outnumber women at the undergraduate and graduate levels, unbalancing the profession as a whole, economists said.
In the past year, the proportion of women earning a Ph.D. degree was about 34%, slightly lower than in 2020; while the proportion of women among major economics graduates was nearly 36%, about a percentage point higher than in 2020, according to an annual report by the American Economic Association (AEA).
According to the AEA report, less than 18% of full professors in business schools with doctoral programs are women.
In recent years, as the industry grappled with the lack of universal gender representation within its ranks, prominent female economists have come up with stories of sexual harassment in the workplace, sparking a #MeToo moment for the profession.
“Fortunately, I haven’t had any of those experiences that seem so commonplace in our discipline, and I don’t know if we’re uniquely bad at economics, but it certainly seems like something that needs to be addressed.” said Kelton.
Anne Owen, a professor of economics and public policy at Hamilton College who used to work at the Fed, said the lack of women in the field makes it harder for female students to build a “sense of belonging,” which can ease the challenges of the profession.
“Going to graduate school in economics is very difficult and you have to persevere,” she added. “It might have been easier to find a reason to persevere if there had been other women pursuing the same thing as me.”
Inequality in representation is even more pronounced among minority women. In 2016, minority women received 5.1% of all business degrees awarded that year, according to an AEA report.
Opoku-Agyeman, the Harvard Kennedy School graduate student, said the lack of diversity in economics exposes it to moments of subtle but damaging forms of disrespect, such as when people question their abilities. Furthermore, the status quo leads to policy outcomes that do not fully consider the perspectives of minority groups, she added.
“We’re doing ourselves a disservice if we have a homogenous-looking group of people overseeing the making of policy and the functioning of our economy,” she said. “Because the guidelines issued are for people who don’t look like a group.”
Still, she said she’s encouraged by the rise of women to leadership positions, particularly at Cook.
“To me it shows that it’s possible,” she said.
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