Women now hold many of the jobs controlling the U.S. economy —the world’s largest — and they’re trying to fix it, overcoming continuing pandemic challenges.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and trade czar Katherine Tai hold top jobs in President Joe Biden’s administration and many of his economic advisers also are women, as are nearly 48% 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.
