WASHINGTON — Women now hold many of 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
administration and many of his economic advisers also are women, as are nearly
48 percent of his confirmed cabinet-level officials.
اضافة اعلان
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 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."
Empathy, Stability
Over the past half-century, 57 women have been president or
prime minister of their countries, but institutions that make economic
decisions have largely been controlled by men until recently.
Outside the United States, there's Christine Lagarde at the
helm of the European Central Bank with its 2.4 trillion euro balance sheet,
Kristalina Georgieva at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with its $1
trillion in lending power, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the World Trade
Organization — all jobs held by men a decade ago.
Overall, there are women running finance ministries in 16
countries, and 14 of the world's central banks, according to an annual report
prepared by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a
think tank for central banking and economic policy.
The limited measures available suggest women have a better
track record of managing complicated institutions through crisis.
"When women are involved, the evidence is very clear:
communities are better, economies are better, the world is better,"
Georgieva said in January, citing research compiled by the IMF and other
institutions.
"Women make great leaders because we show empathy and
speak up for the most vulnerable people. Women are decisive ... and women can
be more willing to find a compromise."
A study by the American Psychological Association showed
that US states with female governors had fewer COVID-19 deaths than those led
by men, and Harvard Business Review reported that women got significantly
better ratings in 360-degree assessments of 60,000 leaders between March to
June 2020.
Women account for less than 2 percent of CEOs at financial
institutions and less than 20% of executive board members, but the institutions
they do run show greater financial resilience and stability, IMF research
shows.
Eric LeCompte, a UN adviser and executive director of a
non-profit that advocates for debt relief, said he noticed a clear difference
during a meeting with Yellen and the leaders of Christian and Jewish faith
groups last month.
"I've been meeting with Treasury secretaries for 20 years,
and their talking points have been entirely different," he said. "In
every area we discussed, Yellen put an emphasis on empathy, and the impact of
policies on vulnerable communities."
Her male predecessors had a "brass tacks" approach
that focused first on "numbers not people" and never mentioned words
like "vulnerable," he said.
The global she-session
The stakes are high.
The global recession related to the coronavirus pandemic is
actually a "she-session," many economists say, because of how hard it
has hit women.
Women comprise 39 percent of the global workforce but
account for 54 percent of overall job losses, McKinsey found in a recent study.
In the United States, women accounted for more than half the 10 million jobs
lost during the COVID-19 crisis
here, and over 2 million women have left the labor
force altogether.
Bringing these women back to work could boost gross domestic
product by 5 percent in the United States, 9 percent in Japan, 12 percent in
the United Arab Emirates and an astounding 27 percent in India, the world's
largest democracy, the IMF estimates.
The rise of female leaders should lead to "a more
inclusive - in the true sense of the word - response to the many, many
challenges that are the legacy of COVID," Carmen Reinhart, the World
Bank's chief economist, told Reuters.
Tai, the first woman of color to lead the US Trade
Representative's office, has told her staff to think "outside the
box", embrace diversity and talk to communities long ignored.
Okonjo-Iweala, also the first African to head the World Trade
Organization, which oversaw trade flows of nearly $19 trillion in 2019, said
addressing the needs of women will mark an important step toward rebuilding
deeply eroded faith in government and global institutions.
"The lesson for us is (to) make sure ... that we don't
sink into business as usual," said Okonjo-Iweala, who was also Nigeria's
first female finance minister. "It's about people. It's about inclusivity.
It's about decent work for ordinary people," she told Reuters.
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