WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Women now hold many of the jobs controlling the world’s largest economy – and they’re trying to fix it. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and trade czar Katherine Tai hold top jobs in U.S. 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. Yellen says the focus on "human infrastructure," and the earlier $1.9 trillion rescue bill should result in significant improvements for women, whose share of the workforce had hit 40-year lows even before the crisis, and for everyone else as well. "In the end, it might be that this bill makes 80 years of history: it begins […]
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