Who Is Janet Yellen? The Economist To Become United States' First Woman Treasury Secretary

President-elect Joe Biden nominated Janet Yellen to head the US Treasury, Janet Yellen's nomination as the first female Treasury Secretary was approved by the Senate Finance Committee of America on Friday. All 26 members of the Committee voted in her favour. When she gets approval from the full Senate, she will take her role as the first woman to ever become Treasury Secretary of the United States of America

Here are 10 things you need to know about Janet Yellen.

• Janet Yellen was born on August 13, 1946 to a Polish family in Brooklyn Borough, New York City. She is an Ivy League graduate, who earned a degree in economics from Brown University, and then went on to receive her PhD in economics from Yale University.
• She is married to professor and economist George Akerlof, a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate. Their son, Robert Akerlof is also an economics professor, at the University of Warwick.
• This is not the first time that Yellen is being appointed as the first woman to an office. She became the first woman to serve as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1997, and also was the first woman to chair Federal Reserve during the Obama administration in 2014.
• Yellen has served as an assistant professor at Harvard, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, an economist with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and taught and conducted research at the Haas School. Twice, she has been awarded the Haas School’s outstanding teacher award.
• Yellen received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Brown University in 1998, an honorary Doctor of Social Science degree from Yale University in 2015 and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Warwick.
• In May 2015, Yellen received an Honorary Doctorate from the London School of Economics. This achievement made her and her husband "the first wife and husband team to hold honorary doctorates from the School".
• In 2012, she was included in the Bloomberg Markets magazine list of ‘50 Most Influential’. Moreover, in 2014, Yellen was named by Forbes as the second most powerful woman in the world, the first being Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. This made her the highest-ranking American on the list.

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• The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute in 2015 ranked Yellen as number one in the Public Investor 100 list. In the same year, she was ranked first in Bloomberg Markets annual list of the 50 most influential economists and policymakers.
• In 1997, she received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale and then an honorary Radcliffe Medal in 2016.
• In October Yellen urged governments to tackle climate change crisis by setting up independent councils outside of political influence, alongside former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney .

Shikha Chandra is an intern with SheThePeople.TV.