Top Federal Reserve officials from a dozen regional banks met on April 13 to discuss the racial-disparity problem within the world of economics.
According to Christopher Rugaber of The Associated Press, “top Federal Reserve policymakers on Tuesday underscored their concern that Black and Hispanic people are sharply underrepresented in the economics field, which lessens the perspectives that economists can bring to key policy issues.”
In a study from the Brookings Institution released on the same day, Peter Conti-Brown, a financial historian at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote that bank directors as a whole “are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly drawn from the business communities within their districts, with little participation from minorities, women, or from areas of the economy — labor, nonprofits, the academy — with important contributions to make to Fed governance.”
