former college professors on their approaches to teaching about abraham lincoln and the civil war era. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. next, treasury secretary janet yellen takes part in a discussion on women and the economy. they address gender equality issues and the need for diversity and inclusion in the economics field. the event took place on international women's day, celebrated annually on march 8th around the world. >> hello, everyone. a very warm welcome to the international monetary fund. i'm jerry rice of the communications department here at the imf. and i can tell you everyone at the fund is absolutely delighted

to be able to celebrate international women's day with a really wonderful event today. two outstanding global women leaders in a conversation about the age of womanomics. we have with us today janet yellen and the managing director of the imf, christalina. over to both of you for this wonderful conversation. >> thank you very much, jerry. i join you in very warmly welcoming secretary yellen at the imf. she has done what no man has achieved in the united states, a hat trick being the chair of the council of economic advisers,

chair of the federal reserve and now the secretary of the treasury. no wonder everybody at the imf is looking forward to hear from you, secretary yellen. we want to learn how you made your choice to get into economics, what have you learned from your life experience that is of interest to the economies at the fund and to everybody at the fund. what we can say about advancing women in economics. what are the barriers to move away? and let me just say that we have chosen the age of womanomics. never in my life i have seen so many women in key positions where core economics and finance

matter. you, as the minister of finance of the united states, christine lagarde, my predecessor at the ecb. the very first woman president of a multilateral development bank. we have two women across the streets, the chief economies of the world bank and of the imf. we are very proud with our own -- and we're very proud of carman on the other side of the street. at the fund we have a deputy managing director, fantastic

dynamic woman, antionette and we have grown our women in management by 20% over the last five years. janet, i admit we still have some way to go to reach parity, but parity, we will reach. now, this being said, we cannot rest because there is still a way to go for women in economics to be equal to men. this crisis is hitting women disproportionately. and we may see as a result, actually, fewer women in economics, not more. unless we act. and that is what this conversation is about. what is it that a leader like

you can do to use your star power to move more women in economics and to make it so that the field is rich and productive for the benefit of all? so welcome. if i may, i want to go into the first question, janet, and it is how you made your choice to study economics. i know that you did this in brown after first intending to major in philosophy. and then you went to yale and there you concentrated your ph.d. on employment and capital formation. you're very well known as strong labor economies. how did you make these choices and how having been concentrated on people, on the impact of

economic policy on people is helping you in your job today. >> first let me say what a pleasure it is to be with you on international women's day and to have a chance to talk about the progress that you described that women have made in our profession. but, unfortunately, we still have a ways to go. there is still too few women around the tables that you and i sit at. but it is wonderful to see the improvement. so i always understood -- i do care about people. i wanted to do something with my life that would have a positive impact on people. and i discovered as a freshman in college that economics was a field that matters to human welfare. i think by way of background, i

tell you that my parents came of age and married during the great depression. and i grew up hearing stories from them about the hardships that the great depression imposed on people. and my father was a family doctor. and most of his patients were blue collar workers, working class people. and his office was actually in our home and i got to know many of his patients. he would talk about their lives to me and my brother and my mother. and he talked about the tool that unemployment took on his patients, the financial tole, the psychological tole, the tole on family life. so i think as a child growing up, unemployment and the job

market, i understood were really critical aspects of economic welfare. and then, i went to brown. i took my first courses in economics. and i discovered that economics, and particularly at that time, had an explanation for what it was that happened in economies and globally that could lead to periods of very high unemployment which took a huge tole on human welfare and what could be done about it. and it was exciting to me. monetary and physical policy were tools we could use to address high unemployment and the world didn't have to suffer indefinitely through periods like the great depression. and i realized early on that was what i wanted to do for my life.

and really that is what i've done for my life is in academic, i studied unemployment and business cycles. and then i had the incredibly rare experience, privilege, to have served as chair of the council of economic advisers in various positions, including chair at the federal reserve. and that was treasury secretary. and throughout, my focus has always been on trying to keep the economy operating as close to full employment as we possibly can. and the benefits that that brings. but i went directly -- many young people now who study economics in college, they take internships, i went directly to graduate school where i had the

privilege to study with james tobin and he was one of the great american economists. and i think what really inspired me about him was that he had a sense of passion for social justice. and, you know, economics as you know, it can be very mathematical. and sometimes in all of the math, people lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day this is about human welfare, it's about making people's lives better. and tobin never lost sight of that. he understood -- he too had lived through the great depression and he understood how important the performance of the economy as a whole is for human welfare. and, you know, he was really a mentor to me and inspired me to study economics. i hope you'll tell me a little

bit about how you became interested in economics and -- >> well, the -- in my case, i studied on the other side of the iron curtain. in the early '80s, i had to decide what would be my ph.d. field. and at that time, two things happened that influenced me to go into environmental economics. the first one was that there was a member of my family who got very sick because of ground water pollution, completely preventable. if we were to have good regulation, and if we were to have access to information. and it cried for me that we have to have policies that are protecting people's health and that are allowing the economy to grow without these negative impacts. and the second reason was that i

got at that time the need to define the value of my -- by quoting a communist party document. which i didn't think was very research-oriented. so i said to myself, what is it that the communist party said don't think about, and it happened to be the environment. but on a more serious note, janet, what you said about your family coming through the depression, seeing people, really so key just to have a job. it reminds me, my country, bulgaria during the '90s when our economy collapsed, hyper inflation and my mother's life saving over a couple of days.

i had to get up at 4:00 to buy milk for my daughter which is so clearly a lesson as to bad policies are being paid by ordinary people's suffering and good policies can bring opportunities to everyone. so my message to my staff at the fund is, policies are for people, for improving people's lives. and your point that we need to make, it's so clear that economics is not a dry science. it is actually an empathetic science, one that is about the livelihoods of people and the ability for society to do better. >> i completely agree with you. it vitally effects human welfare

and really studies trends and developments that have an enormous impact on the quality of people's lives, what they feel they can achieve and the opportunities that they have. and, of course, your background in environmental economics is tremendously important now as we deal with the challenges posed by climate change and -- which something that is a critical global challenge that we're all focused on now. >> we take it to be the heart of the work of the imf now and in the future because we have to bring economic policy to help us both manage the risks of climate change, but also capture the opportunities of green job and green growth that can bring

everybody in a better position if properly done. one of the issues that we want to bring to the audience today is how come -- we know that diversity of thought is very valuable and yet it is a persistent problem. we don't have enough women in economics. in fact, in the last two decades, the share of women in ph.d. in economics has stagnated. it's around 30-ish percent. in '71, you were the only woman of about two dozen ph.d. in yale, in economics. but it's stagnating. what can we do about it? how can we open up a more

interest and to bring more young girls to be seeing themselves, to be the janet yellen of the future? >> that's a great question. let me offer some thoughts and i would be interested in what you're thinking is on this as well. so, first of all, i think when women are introduced to economics and often they don't take an economics course either in high school or in college, but when they do, often the way economics is taught is a turnoff to them. and what you and i just talked about, how important economics is to human welfare, they don't see that in an introductory economics class. and they often in

disproportionate other numbers go off to other fields. they're more attracted to sociology which they think concerns how people live and interact and what determines human welfare. and so one thing i think we have to do, the pipeline issue really starts early. there are a lot of people now who were thinking about how can we teach economics in a way that shows women that this is a great field and away to improve human welfare. there are people like claudia golden who is at harvard who has a grant experiments in undergraduate economics classes to see and to study these experiments, to see what works.

and it's biased towards things that interest men rather than women and rewriting those books. the second thing i would say is that there's been an absence of mentors and role models. there are just not enough women in economics and not enough women who see what a career has -- how satisfying a career can be. there's implicit bias against women. it was an experiment. someone had sent out emails to faculty members in an economics department, some were clearly written by men and some by women. and the emails to the faculty requested just ten minutes of time to talk about something and

the emails were identical. but it turns out that requests by women were ignored way more than requests by men. that's not the only thing that shows a complicit bias against women. there was a "new york times" article recently about the way in which women are treated in seminars versus men. and my guess is that you and i have had the same experience which is that economic seminars can be pretty aggressive and it's not unusual when a person is giving a seminar for interruptions to start very early. but a really rigorous study that was reported recently in "the times" showed there's much more aggressiveness towards women. typically a woman can start

giving a presentation and before she's even through her initial slide, this is my topic and this is what i'm going to do in the seminar, somebody has said you've asked the wrong question and that data isn't relevant anyhow to the question. this does show up in a whole variety of ways. i think experiments in experience, i think suggest that women enjoy collaborative environments more than aggressive environments. and, you know, the more women there are in a workplace or in an economics department, the more collaborative and supportive it tends to be towards women. having more women actually changes the culture. i was president of the american economic association last year and we did a study -- we surveyed women in the field to

try to understand the culture and why there were so few women. and the results were really startling. they showed a huge amount of discrimination against women. that people felt harassed. they felt the environment was often aggressive. they change their behavior in ways that enabled them to survive it, but were probably not good for their careers. and so one of the things that we did in response to this, we realized there's a culture problem in the profession and we need to change the culture. and we set up a task force on best practices and tried to give concrete suggestions to how leaders, like ourselves in institutions like ours who are

in academic departments, what are some things they could do that would make the environment more positive to promote diversity and inclusion. and there are a lot of things that we're able to bring to the table. so, for example, i saw this at brookings, you know, before i came to this job. when it's time to have new ph.d.s for recruiting season, the head of the economics group at brookings sent us an email and said, i think as a practice we should make sure that at least for the first ten minutes of the seminar we do not interrupt with hostile questions, only clarifying questions. it's a simple suggestion. it's not so hard. empowering bystanders who see bad behavior to act against it.

making sure when we have panels or conferences, making sure that there are women on the program. we have a host of suggestions and they're sitting on the american economic association website. i think that if they were widely adopted, the profession would be a more positive -- provide a more positive culture for women. i'm sure you've thought about this too. i'm really interested in what you're thinking is. >> well, the two lessons i learned in my professional life, the first one is the danger of women trying to blend in a male-dominated environment. just flashed in my mind, walking into the world bank being in

washington for the first time. i was to give a seminar. and i had a colorful jackets with flowers on it. i walked in the building, looked around, walked out, went and bought a dark blue suit so i can blend. but it is dangerous because what we want is diversity. we want women to bring ideas and perspectives that otherwise will not be in the conversation to emphasize topics that otherwise may be underrepresented in research. and so i told myself since then, we need to create an environment in which everybody, men and women, feel equally comfortable and they can step up. so what does that mean? this is the second thing i learned, there simply have to be more women in senior positions.

and the women in senior positions ought to mentor other women, to make sure that they create that sense of confidence for younger women to step up. i crafted the phrase that i repeat very often to women, i do bring our senior women together at the fund. and what i tell them is, don't be shy. please apply. because as you know, women may be more self-critical and forego opportunities to engage on positions which they have a lot to contribute, including in management. so i think that you and i, people like me, we have a tremendous responsibility to bring up women. and also to be as direct -- as

direct and honest as we can be. i'm going to ask you a question one of our women economists at the fund is dying to hear from you. how do you handle setbacks? because we do have that tendency to mostly talk about we broke a ceiling, we got somewhere further and faster. but we don't talk enough about what we have to overcome to reach this. so what would be -- what would be your advice to women that may hit a wall, how to handle it, how to handle disappointment? >> i think we've all had that experience of hitting a wall and feeling disappointed, even either over a small setback in a job or, you know, a larger

failure. but, you know, what i've done in my own life is i think simply to move on. i have the advantage as i'm sure you do, i love what i do. i love the field. i really find it interesting. there are a lot of different things i can do, a lot of different paths to take and if one thing doesn't work out, i look for something else that is a path forward. i was an assistant professor at harvard. now, not very many people got tenure, but i was certainly one of the people who did not get tenure. was that a setback? i'm not sure. i didn't really expect to get tenure. but at that point i decided i would do something different and i came to the federal reserve. i joined the staff as a research

economist. and i discovered how much i enjoyed doing public policy and how much i enjoyed monetary policy and international economics and applied issues. and it was a different path, but it ultimately really took me into a large part of my career that has -- you know, was started by my experience at the fed. i wanted to come back. i understood what the federal reserve was doing and how i could contribute what it was like. so, you know, not taking it too seriously. everybody has setbacks and we have to move on. >> it is wonderful. it actually sums up my philosophy which is, one door closes, another one opens up.

i remember coming back to bulgaria from australia where i was applying to be a professor in the university in australia. i'm coming back, i didn't get the job. and the next thing that happened was, i got to go to m.i.t. and i had wonderful one year there. then joined the world bank and the rest is history. so we have to do -- we have to recognize that not everything we strive for will happen. but believe in yourself and persevere and look for things that give you a sense of contribution to make your community, your country, the world a better place. talking about the world getting to be a better place, janet, one

thing that i know you're very concerned and i'm very concerned about is the disproportionate impact of this crisis on women, on young people, on those with low skills. some are now talking about a recession that impacts women. that is probably a youth-cession to look into. how do you see us stepping up in your work, me, myself, at the work of the fund to make sure that we do not lose progress made on gender equality and we push forward for dealing with inequalities of any kind as a positive outcome that can come from this crisis. >> yeah.

that's a very important question. thank you. i think it's absolutely tragic the impact that this crisis has had on women, especially low-skilled women and minorities. in the united states, we've been talking about this as a k-shaped crisis. people at the top of the income distribution have continued to do very well. and people closer to the bottom have -- who have been really struggling for a long time in the united states and many other countries have been the hardest hit. it issen extremely unfair thing that's happened. women first because they tend to be disproportionately represented in the service sector, that's been hardest hit, have seen tremendous job loss.

and then because women still disproportionately have the responsibility for caring for children, with children out of school there and responsibilities for taking care of six relatives or family, they've dropped out of the labor force disproportionately as well. so we've had a huge decline in the labor force. people just can't work. they have to take care of children who can't be in school. and they've really lost a lot of income and opportunities. we're really concerned about scarring -- permanent scarring from this crisis. and it's focused us very heavily on doing everything we can to get back on track as quickly as

we can. president biden, i'm delighted to be part of this. we're hoping that this week a large pandemic package is going to be passed in congress that will, you know, really -- i hope by next year, i think there's a prospect that with an all-out effort on vaccination and reopening schools, that we can really get the labor market back on track later this year or next year to avoid what we had after the financial crisis, which was almost a decade before the economy ever got back to full employment. we don't want to see that happen this time. but there are long-standing challenges that women face. they're disproportionately represented in the care economy where job opportunities are not

that good. often jobs lack benefits, have low wages, and we're going to address that as well going forward. i think we need to -- need to really improve conditions that women face, bring them into the labor market. one of the things you've seen in the united states is that labor force participation for prime age women has plateaued at a lower level than we see in europe and it's actually drifting down over time. we don't have many people -- many people don't have paid leave for family emergencies and we lack adequate childcare support for people who work. and so these are things we're going to address over time. >> we are very supportive, as you know, of the policies we are

pursuing to address the needs of the most vulnerable people, to provide relief to the poor, to those who are most severely impacted by the unemployment this crisis has triggered. and also creating some of the policies that long term help more women to be in the labor force like more funding for childcare. i hope we will see this very progressive policies to be taking hold not only because we are responding to this crisis, but because we want the world economy to be dynamic on the basis of bringing in the talent of all people, men and women. >> absolutely. >> so we wish you in that regard

as the treasury secretary all the success, and i know that you also have your eyes set on making sure that the united states leads the world in the transition to the new climate economy where i hope there would be a lot of space for women. >> yes. >> we are coming to, unfortunately, to the end of time. i cannot believe that we have almost exhausted the time we have for this conversation. i do want to bring in the end a message to all the young people that are watching. what should they aspire for? it is a difficult time for those who entered the labor market for the first time.

how should they think of the future? what should they be excited about? >> well, you know, there are so many challenges that we face as a global community. climate change, diversity and inclusion, economic growth, so many challenges that we face. and young people have many, many different paths by which they can involve themselves and contribute. my view of a good life is if i'm advising young people, it's first of all try to figure out what really excites you. what are you interested in? most of us who work, you want to get up every day and really look

forward to how you're going to spend the day, the problems that you're going to work on. and so figuring out -- for me it was easy. i fell in love with economics as a freshman in college. but, you know, figuring out what is it you really enjoy doing and want to get up every day and do. and i hope for many people it will be economics. i think economics is a terrific field. but there are obviously a lot of other paths. and then the second thing i'd say is no one most of us don't work independently. we work in organizations. and i think one's identity is very much tied to one's job and how you feel about it. and being part of an organization whose mission you really identity with, that you can feel proud to say, i work for the imf. i work for the u.s. treasury.

and that means something. you have a mission. we have a mission. you can explain what it is and identity with it and feel it's something that makes the world a better place. and that you believe in the way the organization is run, that it has the right values. that it treats people well. that it -- it supports people and you have an environment where you're going to work every day with people you respect and collaborate with. to me, those are the elements of a good life. and that's kind of what i would recommend to young people. >> this is really a wonderful message. be a force for good. i could not finish this conversation in a better way, janet. i hope that everybody who has

listened to you would be inspired to reach for their full potential, and who knows, maybe one day somebody will write a hip-hop song for you as well. i actually prepared myself for this conversation listening to the song. i don't dare sing it. but it -- >> nor do i. >> and i recommend it highly to everybody on this call. i'm very proud to belong to the same profession you belong to. and i'm particularly proud that you and i share a birthday. >> we do. we do. >> with this -- now everybody would know that you would get my best wishes always on your birthday, janet. >> and likewise.

by share a common mission and i look forward to working for closely with you on a host of challenges in the days ahead and our organizations together. >> we will. a lot to do for a better world. thank you very, very, very, very much. on behalf on all of us at the imf. >> thank you so much for the invitation. thank you very much. >> thank you, janet. >> thank you. >> on behalf of everyone watching, women and men, this was truly inspirational and thanks to secretary yellen. thanks to the managing director for a truly wonderful conversation. thanks to everybody. we're live on capitol hill where secretary of state antony blinken will be testifying before the house foreign affairs

committee about u.s. foreign policy priorities. congressman gregory meeks chairs this committee. live coverage here on c-span3.

>> taking a look at some of the spending that it's in this package. $123 billion dedicated directly to covid-19-related policy which includes 47 billion for disaster relief funds and funeral expenses, 50 billion for testing and contact tracing, using the defense production act to buy and distribute medical supplies. and vaccine distribution and confidence in supply chains 16 billion. taking a look at the state and local money, it would provide 195 billion to state governments. it would provide money for local governments, territories and tribes. that cost 155 billion.

10 billion for infrastructure and it would create paid covid relief for federal workers and other policies, that price tag $400 million. the paper version of the chart highlights some of the other spending there as well. $246 billion for extended unemployment programs, 143 billion for expanding tax credits and the stimulus check, the $1,400 direct payment. 410 billion. some of the breakdowns of who stands to get that direct payment, individuals earning less than 75,000 per year and couples earning less than 150,000 per year are eligible for the full 1400 payment for individuals and 2800 for couples and the checks fully phase out for individuals earning more than 80,000 per year and couples earning more than 160,000 per year. that's a change from the past bill who had the full phaseouts starting at 100,000 and

200,000 -- in a moment, with house rules, regulations, all participates are asked to keep themselves muted and while not actively engages in the discussion which should help limit echoes. the host will mute. remembers are responsible for unmuting themselves any time they wish to be heard.