Catch-Up for Calculating Women

Female economists are on the rise after years of discrimination

Not long ago, prominent women economists were almost as scarce as generals in skirts. Today, though they must still battle prejudice, more and more women are scaling the heights of the profession. One reason: the increasing complexity of figuring out what is really happening on today's business scene has created a demand for trained economists that often makes ability outweigh gender. In short, discrimination is no longer affordable. Equally important, the rising confidence and assertiveness of women is felt in economics as in most other fields.

The growing stature of women economists is most obvious in the policy-making realms of Government, where political pressures have weakened antifemale prejudices far more than in the worlds of academe and business. Never have so many women economists held such high federal posts as they do today. Some notable examples:

ALICE MITCHELL RIVLIN, 47, since 1975 has been director of the Congressional Budget Office, which was created that year to give objective advice to Congressmen on the cost and effectiveness of various Government programs. Under Rivlin the CBO has annoyed Republicans by reporting that President Ford's spending budget was inadequate for the needs of the economy and nettled Democrats by branding the Carter Administration's estimates of what the energy program would accomplish "overly optimistic."

Rivlin was graduated from Bryn Mawr and earned a doctorate in economics at Radcliffe. She is widely regarded as one of the nation's most effective economic technicians, and knows Washington's power game well. A nominal liberal, she was an Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and, in the early '70s, specialized in budget watching at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Says Rivlin, who is a divorced mother of three: "Things are better now for women economists, but history is difficult to break. The ranks are very thin in my age group."

NANCY HAYS TEETERS, 48, four months ago became the first woman member of the Federal Reserve Board. She is a seasoned Washington hand. After graduate study in economics at Michigan State, she was an economist at the Fed, became a staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Kennedy years and put in a stint at the Bureau of the Budget. She was a senior fellow at Brookings in the early '70s, and just before being tapped for the Fed was chief economist for the House Budget Committee.

An expert on budgets and unemployment patterns, Teeters is a liberal on most issues. Her vote on the Reserve Board could be critical in deciding whether to increase the risk of recession by letting borrowing costs continue to go up. Teeters is one of the few women economists who say that they did not encounter any discrimination in their rise to the top. "In fact," Teeters asserts, "while I was having three children, the Fed even created a part-time job so that I could continue working."

JUANITA KREPS, who will turn 58 next week, is the first economist as well as the first woman to be Secretary of Commerce. She worked up the academic ladder to become a Duke University vice president, and has held a long list of corporation and foundation directorships.

Born in the hardscrabble coal country of Harlan County, Ky., Kreps completed her undergraduate studies at Kentucky's Berea College, earned a doctorate in economics at Duke, and has specialized in the problems of working women and the aged. Married (to an economist) and the mother of three, she says that the "big problem in being a professional woman with a family is that you simply have less time for the profession." Kreps finds enough time to be in the forefront of the drive to boost U.S. exports. Except in the rarest cases, she opposes the policy of withholding high-technology American exports from countries that flout the Administration's human rights and diplomatic goals.

COURTENAY SLATER, 45, is chief economist at the Commerce Department and one of the Administration's key economic tea-leaf readers. To determine where the economy is going, she pores over mountains of statistics that Commerce collects on trade, inflation, retail sales and other matters. As a student, Slater wanted to become a physicist, but was told by a professor that "women just did not go into physics." After graduating as a history major from Oberlin College and marrying (her husband is a program analyst for the National Science Foundation), Slater decided to enter a field that would lead to Government work, and economics looked right. She finally earned a Ph.D. in economics after a twelve-year slog of night school at American University. In 1967 she joined the staff of the CEA, then moved to the Joint Economic Committee, where she became the senior economist. She calls herself a "pragmatic liberal."

ISABEL V. SAWHILL, 41, is director of the National Commission for Manpower Policy, which advises Congress and the President on employment issues (operators who answer the commission's phones now say, "National Commission for Employment Policy," though Sawhill has not yet been able to make an official change from the rather sexist old name). A native of Washington, D.C., Sawhill received her economics doctorate from New York University, and remembers that she was often the only woman in her classes. She soon found that the best opportunity for advancement was in Government; and, since the late '60s, she has moved from one federal agency to another. Married to John Sawhill, onetime energy czar under President Nixon and now president of her alma mater, N.Y.U., she is the mother of a son, age 18.

Though as a woman she had to overcome prejudice in the past, Sawhill says, "All that is over now. In fact, discrimination today is probably in my favor." A chief concern since she took office in 1977 has been how to achieve price stability with full employment. "Ideologically I'm middle-of-the-road," she says. "There is no way to solve all problems through Government intervention."

Women have had a harder, slower climb in universities than in Government. Rivlin points to the reason: "It's harder to discriminate in Government." In 1977 only 3.3% of all full professors of economics were women; in the leading universities, the figure was only 1%. Still, a growing number of female stars are today rising over the campuses. One of them, Marina Whitman, 43, economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, broke new ground by becoming the first female member of the three-person CEA in the Nixon Administration. A specialist in global economics, Whitman says wryly of her CEA appointment: "There was a kind of debutante quality about it." One of the vexing problems that she encountered in Washington was that women and men very often were separated after dinner. Eventually, she stopped accepting dinner invitations.

Another campus standout, Phyllis Wallace, now in her 50s, has been burdened by prejudice against blacks as well as women. She spent decades in and out of undistinguished middle-level teaching and Government jobs before her talents were finally recognized and she was made a tenured professor at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. Wallace believes that the main difficulty facing young women entering the field of economics is to break into the mentor-protege system, which has historically excluded females. Says she: "Without a mentor, you have a lot of trouble getting money to do research on your own."

Ann Friedlaender, 40, professor of economics and civil engineering at M.I.T., made her mark with a widely influential study of the costs and benefits of the interstate highway system. As head of the women's caucus of the American Economic Association, Friedlaender has been a leader in the drive to get more women into graduate school.

Only a handful of women economists occupy top spots in business, but even there conditions are improving. One of the best-known business specialists is Kathleen Cooper, 33, who is an economist for the Denver-based United Banks of Colorado, an 18-bank holding company. Says she: "More and more women are coming into the profession and doing well, but there aren't a whole lot at the top. I'm a rarity." Another rarity is Kathryn Eickhoff, vice president and treasurer of Townsend-Greenspan, economic consultants to many of the nation's largest corporations. She assumed most of the duties of the firm's president, Alan Greenspan, when he went to Washington as chief of the CEA under President Ford.

For all the progress, old biases die hard. Says Carolyn Shaw Bell, a Wellesley College economics professor and a prime mover in the drive to place more women in important economic positions: "There is a clear indication of change at some levels, but the advancement of women has to be pushed if it is to continue."

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