Fed must do more to boost diversity in ranks: Brainard

Bloomberg

Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the US central bank must improve its recruitment of women and people from minority backgrounds because greater diversity leads to better policy decisions.
Noting that it was more than a century after the Fed’s creation that the one of its 12 regional banks was headed by an African American — Raphael Bostic, who became president of the Atlanta Fed in 2017 — Brainard said “we need to do better.”
“To achieve our goals, we will need to improve the diversity of the economics eco- system more broadly,” Brai-nard told a conference in Washington to commemorate Sadie T. M. Alexander, the first African American wom-an to gain a Ph.D in economics.
The Fed hires one of every 25 “newly minted” economics Ph.Ds in the US each year, Brainard said, and therefore has “a significant stake in the diversity and vibrancy of the economics profession overall.”
The Fed gained its first woman leader when Janet Yellen took the helm in 2014. She was passed over for a second term when Presid-ent Donald Trump picked Jerome Powell to succeed her in 2018. Women remain a minority of the central bank’s leadership. Brainard, herself an economics Ph.D. from Harvard, is one of five women currently serving as either a governor, of which there are seven when the Fed has a full compliment, or reserve bank president.
In her speech, “Is Economics for Me? Increasing the Participation of Black Wo-men in Economics,” Brainard said that “the field of economics would be the richer from your engagement and has much to offer as you decide how to make your contribution.”