Bloomberg: Brainard Says Fed Must Do More to Boost Diversity in Its Ranks

By Alister Bull

23 February 2019

Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the U.S. 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 ecosystem more broadly,” Brainard told a conference in Washington on Saturday to commemorate Sadie T. M. Alexander, the first African American woman to gain a Ph.D in economics.

The Fed hires one of every 25 “newly minted” economics Ph.Ds in the U.S. 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 President Donald Trump picked Jerome Powell to succeed her in 2018. Women remain a minority of the central bank’s leadership.

Read the full article in Bloomberg.