Janet Yellen was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, to parents of Polish-Jewish descent. After graduating valedictorian from Fort Hamilton High School, she attended Pembroke College in Brown University, where she studied philosophy before switching to economics. Yellen continued to Ph.D. in economics at Yale University, the only woman in her class. She then worked as an assistant professor at Harvard, and later on as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. At age 32, she moved to London for a couple of years to lecture at The London School of Economics and Political Science. On her return to the US, she became a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley.
At age 48, Yellen took leave from Berkeley for a few years to serve as a member of the Board of Governors, 3 years later she was appointed as the head of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. In that position, she oversaw a study that explored the reasons for the gender pay divide, concluding the pay gap is a result of discrimination and not productivity. In 2004, she was nominated as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. As such, she often spoke about her concern about the consequences of rising housing prices.
In 2010, Yellen was nominated by President Obama as the vice-chair of the Federal Reserve System. During her term, she advocated for the Federal Reserve to risk higher inflation to reduce unemployment. Four years later, she was nominated by President Obama as Chair of the Federal Reserve, the first vice-chair to be elevated, the first woman in this position, as well as the first Democrat to run the Fed since 1979. Once in office, she began to reverse some of the policies endowed after the mortgage crisis of 2008. Her tenure is recognized for growth in job and wage while maintaining low-interest rates – the greatest improvement in the US since 1948.
When her term ended in February 2018, she became a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. In December 2020, the president-elect Joe Biden has nominated her to be the first woman Secretary of the Treasury.
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