Women key to growth: Yellen
Four mining licences put up for bids
IN AN unusually personal speech, Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said on Friday that policies making it easier for women to work could significantly improve the nation’s economic growth.
The sweeping movement of women from the home to the workplace during the mid-20th century, she said, was a “major factor in America’s prosperity”. But that progress has stalled in recent decades, leaving women less likely than men to hold paying jobs. Bringing more women into the workforce with policies like expanding the availability of paid leave, affordable child care and flexible work schedules, she said, could help to lift the US economy from a long stretch of slow growth.
“Evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals,” Yellen said in a speech at Brown University. “If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the ageing of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.”
Yellen cited one recent estimate that raising women’s participation to the same level as men’s could increase the nation’s annual economic output by 5 percent.
Women’s participation in the workforce increased gradually through most of the 20th century, then rose more rapidly from the early 1970s through the early 1990s. About one-third of working-age women held jobs outside the home in the years after World War II. By the early 1990s, about threequarters of those women worked.
Since then, however, the trend has stagnated. The proportion of women ages 25 to 54 either working or looking for work stood at 75 percent in April.
That remains more than 10 percentage points lower than the figure for men in the same age range working or seeking work, which was 88.6 percent in April.
Yellen’s speech was unusually narrative and unusually personal. Speaking at her alma mater, she told the stories of other women who graduated from Brown, including her husband’s aunt, Elizabeth Stafford Hirschfelder. She said Hirschfelder, who graduated in 1923, faced discrimination throughout her career as a mathematician. “I believe that Betty Stafford Hirschfelder was denied opportunities and greater success simply because she was a woman,” she said.
Yellen, who is 70, said women of her own generation had faced fewer obstacles and had more opportunities. “I enrolled at Brown fully planning to attend graduate school and have a career, as did many of my classmates in the Class of 1967,” she said. She noted that changes in poli- cy supported and reinforced changes in society. A 1974 law, for example, allowed women to apply for loans without a male cosigner.
Women gained entry into a wider range of professions, and the gap between men’s and women’s wages narrowed significantly. Nancy H Teeters became the first woman appointed to the Fed’s board in September 1978. Yellen said that their increased workforce participation had produced clear benefits not only for women, but also for men, for the children of working women and for the US economy.
That progress, however, has stalled in the US even as the participation of women in the workforce has continued to rise in other developed countries. The United States, which had one of the highest rates of participa- tion in the early 1990s, fell to 17th among 22 developed nations in one recent analysis.
That analysis, a 2013 study by Francine D Blau and Lawrence M Kahn, both of Cornell University, attributed much of the difference to government policies. The United States lags behind other countries in the availability of paid maternity leave, affordable child care and flexible work schedules. Blau and Kahn estimated that adopting European policies on those issues could close more than half of the gap in the United States between male and female labour force participation.
Yellen also cited research showing that women still make about 10 percent less, on average, than men with similar backgrounds who work in similar positions. THE Ministry of Mines and Energy has publicly announced that companies can bid for four mining exploration permits in both Kratie and Kampot provinces, marking the first time since the ministry was formed in 2013 to issue fresh licences for private companies to investigate mineral resource potential.
The areas up for grabs comprise a total of 553 square kilometres, with three sites in Kratie and one in Kampot.
Meng Saktheara, secretary of state at the Ministry of Mines and Energy, said exploration permits had previously been issued for the four areas but were revoked from their holders more than a year ago due to lack of activity.
“While these licences are not new, geological studies show that they have potential for primarily the extraction of copper and gold,” he said. “The reason why we are putting these licences up for bidding is that we want to know more about how much potential they have.”
He declined to say who the previous licence holders where.
However, he said that by making the announcement public he hoped that it would show that ministry was acting in a transparent and progressive manner.
“This accomplishes two things,” Saktheara said. “First, we have sent out our own teams to do a preliminary assessment of the area and see what the environmental impacts would be. Second, it allows private landowners in the areas to petition to the ministry to avoid any land eviction claims if mining starts.”
He added that the new licences have been scaled back from the originals to protect areas that the ministry deems environmentally and politically sensitive.
“We want to make sure we don’t have any land dispute problems,” he said.