An Interview with Alice Rivlin
Hali J. Edison, Board of Governors - Federal Reserve System
Federal Reserve Vice Chair Alice Rivlin speaks with Hali Edison
about her experiences as an economist and a policymaker. She offers encouragement
to those starting out: "Do something you enjoy and do it well and then don't
worry!"
Vice Chair Rivlin (Ph.D.-Radcliffe College 1958) has a held
a number of high level posts in the federal government. Before becoming a member
of the Federal Reserve Board, Dr. Rivlin served as Director of the White House
Office of Management and Budget, she was the founding Director of the Congressional
Budget Office, Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, and
Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare. In addition, Dr. Rivlin is the recipient of a MacArthur
Foundation Prize Fellowship and served as President of the American Economics
Association.
Q. Why did you decide to go into economics? Did your
professors or friends encourage you in this endeavor or did they try to direct
you to another field?
A. I started at Bryn Mawr College intending to major
in history, which I found fascinating--still do. Then, rather accidentally,
I took first year economics in summer school at Indiana University, just because
economics sounded like something one ought to know about. I lucked into a class
with a superb young instructor, who got the whole class excited about economic
ideas. (This was the late Reuben Zubrow, who subsequently had a long career
of distinguished teaching and research at the University of Colorado.) I decided
that economics might be more useful than history, so I went back to Bryn Mawr
and switched my major to economics. Economics was a small major at women's colleges
in those days, so we got a lot of individual attention from the faculty. I wrote
my undergraduate honors thesis on the economic integration of Western Europe,
which was a pretty prescient topic choice in 1952. I even had a discussion of
European monetary union! By then I was sufficiently hooked to be thinking about
graduate school, but I went to Europe for a year first, where I had a junior
job in Paris working on the Marshall Plan.
Q. What was it like to be a woman graduate student in
economics at Harvard University in the 1950's? (In particular, were women treated
differently?)
A. Harvard was having a hard time adjusting to the
idea of women in the academy. Indeed, since I was already focused on policy,
I applied first to the graduate school of public administration (now The Kennedy
School), which rejected my application on the explicit grounds that a woman
of marriageable age was a "poor risk." I then applied to the economics department,
which had about 5 per cent females in the doctoral program. They were just working
up their courage to allow women to be teaching fellows and tutors in economics.
I taught mixed classes, but initially was assigned only women tutees. One of
my tutees wanted to write an honors thesis on the labor movement in Latin America--a
subject on which one of my male colleagues had considerable expertise. He was
willing to supervise my young woman if I would take one of his young men. However,
the boy's senior tutor objected to the switch on the grounds that being tutored
by a woman would make a male student feel like a second class citizen. People
actually said things like that in those days!
The second year that I taught a section of the introductory
economics course, I was expecting a baby in March and did not teach the spring
semester. The man who took over my class announced to the class that, since
no woman could teach economics adequately, he would start over and the first
semester grades would not count. It was an exceptionally bright class and I
had given quite a few "A's," so the students were upset. The department chair
had to intervene.
In retrospect, the amazing thing was that the women were not
more outraged. I think we thought we were lucky to be there at all. Outwitting
the system was kind of a game. One of the university libraries was closed to
women, and its books could not even be borrowed for a female on inter-library
loan. I don't remember being upset. If I needed a book, I just got a male friend
to check it out for me.
Q. What prompted you to go into policy work rather than
pursue an academic career?
A. I was always interested in policy. In fact, one
of the things that attracted me to economics was its importance in improving
people's lives. So policy research was a natural for me. Fortuitously, I was
offered a research fellowship at the Brookings Institution, which enabled me
to finish my dissertation. I spent most of my career alternating between Brookings
and various policy jobs in the federal government. Realistically, moreover,
academic opportunities were limited for my generation of women graduate students.
Most major universities did not hire women in tenure track positions. Early
in my career (about 1962), the University of Maryland was looking for an assistant
professor in my general area. I was invited by a friend on the faculty to give
a seminar and then had an interview with the department chairman. He was effusive
in his praise for my work and said how sorry he was that they could not consider
me for the position. I asked why not, and he said that the dean had expressly
forbidden their considering any women. That wasn't illegal at the time, so we
both expressed our regrets, and I left with no hard feelings.
Q. Can you identify a particular person as your mentor?
How did he/she influence your career?
A. Guy Orcutt (who was then at Harvard and later at
Wisconsin and Yale) was my thesis adviser and played a very important role in
encouraging me at an early stage. Later, Joe Pechman at Brookings took me under
his wing and helped me learn the policy research business. Joe spent a lot of
his time mentoring young scholars. He was very good at it and considered it
an important and satisfying part of his job. There were both men and women,
but I thought the fact that he had two daughters made him especially responsive
to the needs of young women scholars. Alicia Munnell was another of his protegees.
Q. You have held many senior positions in government.
What was it like to be the only woman, or one of a few women, in such positions?
Do you think you were treated differently in those positions because you were
a woman?
A. I never worried much about being the only woman
(or one of the few) in the government jobs I held. Sometimes men seemed uncomfortable,
but it usually did not last long when they saw that I was competent and not
self-conscious about being female. I was more aware of breaking into the boy's
clubhouse, when I began serving on corporate boards in the 1980's. Sometimes
corporate meetings would go on for a couple of days, with lots of presentations
by management, consultants, lawyers, and investment bankers, and the only women
besides me were pouring coffee.
The hardest thing for me was learning to speak up in an all
male group (strangers, not my own colleagues) without worrying that I might
say something dumb or be talking too much. I notice lots of younger women still
dealing with this. We tend to be quiet when we are not sure of our ground, while
men are much more comfortable trying out ideas they are not sure of.
Q. What are your views about women s progress in economics,
in general, in government and at the Federal Reserve, in particular?
A. There has been a lot of progress in accepting women,
but the economics profession is still behind law, medicine and many academic
disciplines. My lawyer daughter works in a much less male dominated world than
I do.
A lot of very competent women have been appointed to high level
posts in the federal government in recent years and have made major contributions.
President Clinton gets very high marks on gender diversity for his cabinet and
sub cabinet appointments. But the senior bureaucracy is still predominantly
male. When I came to the Fed in 1996, three of the seven members of the Board
of Governors were women, which was remarkable. But there were no women in the
highest level staff positions. That's changing, but slowly.
Q. How hard was it for you to balance family and work?
Do you think it is getting easier for women to balance work and family? Have
the demands at work been increasing?
A. I think it is always hard to balance career ambitions
and family responsibilities, both for men and women. Women worry about it more,
but men are beginning to worry, too. I had a few bad moments, when my job and
my children seemed to be pulling me in opposite directions, but we all survived.
Sometimes you just have to make the best choice you can. As my daughter says, "You CAN have it all, but you can't have it all at once." I don't sense that
the problem is getting any easier.
Q. Finally, do you have any advice you that would like
to offer to women starting their careers?
A. I wish I had some great words of wisdom, but I am
afraid I don't. My advice would be: be sure you are doing something you can
do well and that you enjoy doing (most of the time, anyway). Then just do it
and don't worry too much. You'll do fine.
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