58 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
Bush Terminal, a group of docks in South Brooklyn. He
worked on the teeth of union workers. At the end of the
day, he’d discuss their lives with young Janet. If they had
lost a job, he would tell her about their financial and family
problems, their inability to afford health care, their loss of
self-worth.
Those lessons stuck with her “so much so that I became
an economist because I was concerned about the toll of
unemployment on people, families, and communities,” she
said in her speech.
But entering a male-dominated field was not without
challenges. “The sexual harassment was ever present,” says
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who received her Ph.D. in economics
from the University of London in the early 1970s before
teaching at Columbia University. The idea of focusing on
gender pay gaps and wealth inequality, as Yellen came
to do in her career, was risky at the time, especially for a
woman, says Hewlett. “Women had two choices—either
they joined the dominant group and didn’t write about it,
or you were seen as a sore thumb.”
In that context, it took chutzpah for a female economisther as Fed chair with Jerome Powell. “She was disap-
pointed,” says her friend Wessel. “She thought that Trump
liked her and that she had a shot at being reappointed.”
Still, she was happy that Powell, a peer she respects, was
nominated to do the job.
It’s still unclear exactly why Trump got rid of Yellen.
Some speculate that he just didn’t want an Obama ap-
pointment at the Fed. Trump told the Washington Post
that he thought she was too short to run the Fed. Wessel
remembers her joking about the story. The Post said she
was five-three when in reality she’s barely five-feet even.
She wasn’t going to call in a correction, Yellen told Wessel,
but somebody else could feel free to.
In December, Yellen stood next to President-
elect Biden in Wilmington, Del., as she accepted his nomi-
nation for Treasury secretary. There, in a speech that was
uniquely candid for the reserved economist, she offered a
window into how she became the person she is today.
Her father, she said, was a dentist who began his busi-
ness during the Great Depression, setting up shop near
“When she chooses to use it,” says the Brookings Institution’s
David Wessel of SECRETARY YELLEN, “she’ll have something
close to VETO POWER over major economic policies.”Yellen speaking
in December
after President
Biden announced
her as his pick to
run the Treasury.KRISTON JAE BETHEL—THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX PICTURES