Janet Yellen’s Long, Personal Speech on Women and Work

It really does make a difference when the chair of the Federal Reserve is a woman. On Friday, Janet Yellen gave a detailed, 18-page speech at her alma mater, Brown University, making clear just how important the topic of women and work is to her. Without taking anything away from her predecessors at the Fed, it’s hard to imagine Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, or Paul Volcker giving such a talk.

In the text of the speech posted on the Fed’s website, Yellen reached back to 1891, the first year women were admitted to what was then called the Women’s College of Brown, to trace the history of women at work in America. Woven through her speech is the story of Elizabeth Stafford Hirschfelder of the Class of 1923, an aunt of Yellen’s husband, George Akerlof (himself a Nobel Prize-winning economist and by all accounts, a supportive spouse).

Betty Stafford, as Yellen called her, “grew up in Providence, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Brown in mathematics, and then rather adventurously headed west, teaching at two universities in Texas in the 1920s before completing her Ph.D. and then teaching at the University of Wisconsin.”

But Stafford's gender seems to have held her back, Yellen recounted. “After earning her Ph.D. at Wisconsin, Betty married a fellow student and over the next decade coauthored five important papers with him and a well-regarded reference work. But, while her husband progressed from instructor to professor at Wisconsin, Betty worked as an instructor on an ad hoc basis. During World War II, while he worked for the government in Washington and New York, Betty stayed in Madison, teaching math to servicemen. When he took a job teaching in California after the war, they divorced, and it was only then that she was a given a position as assistant professor.”