The field of economics has a problem. At a time when more women than men are graduating from college and earning doctorates, just a third of Ph.D.s in economics go to women. That statistic has hardly budged in decades.

The lack of gender diversity has trickled its way into one of the field’s biggest employers of economists: the Federal Reserve, which crafts U.S. monetary policy. For most of its existence the Fed has been dominated by men. That’s why it was such a big deal when Janet Yellen became the first woman to run the Fed in 2014.

But Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor, says the central bank “has a lot of work to do to have a truly diverse set of leaders.” Brainard, an economist, has spent much of her career as one of the few women in the room when major policy decisions are made.

“When you’re sitting around a decision-making table, you look around and you say to yourself: ‘Hmm, this table doesn’t look like a typical classroom in America.’ And until it does we’re not going to be getting the best possible outcomes that this country deserves,” she says.

Brainard says a growing body of research suggests that diversity leads to better decision-making. Top voices at the Fed are raising the red flag at a time when the Fed’s integrity is under intense scrutiny, with President Trump routinely blasting the central bank for raising interest rates.

The institution has been a political punching bag before, most notably in recent times for its handling of the financial crisis. The seminal legislation that came out of that era, the Dodd-Frank Act, called for the U.S. Government Accountability Office to examine governance at the Federal Reserve Banks. The GAO’s 2011 report found that more diversity would strengthen the Fed’s legitimacy.

Lawmakers have taken notice. Last Tuesday, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, introduced legislation aimed at boosting diversity among Federal Reserve Bank presidents. It would require that at least one gender-diverse candidate and racially or ethnically diverse candidate gets interviewed when there’s an opening. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

Former Fed chiefs are also concerned and are weighing in.

At an annual gathering of the American Economic Association in Atlanta last week, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the association’s new president, acknowledged that a reputation for hostility has kept women — and minorities — away.

“I think it’s very important for economics that we change equilibrium, that we change the perception of economics as being unfriendly to any group of people,” he said during a panel discussion that also included Yellen.

She said it “should be the highest priority for us over the next couple of years.” And Yellen said the association, which she will lead starting next year, has formed a committee that will focus on ways to improve “the environment for women and minorities.”

In recent years, the Fed has taken deliberate steps to address not just the gender disparity, but also racial and ethnic diversity. A few years ago, it brought on professor Amanda Bayer of Swarthmore College as an adviser.

“As we try to develop knowledge for the use of policymakers and as we try to develop specific policies, we’re hindered by the lack of diversity in our ranks,” she says.

Bayer organized the Fed’s first national summit on diversity in 2014. That summit is now an annual event. And last month, she partnered with the central bank on a new website that gives U.S. universities a visual scorecard on diversity at the undergraduate level, where she says the problem often begins.

“Before very recently, fingers were pointed at women themselves looking to factors like women’s tastes or math preparation as explainers of why they didn’t choose us and join us as economists,” Bayer says.

But increasingly, the field is looking within to understand why so few women decide to pursue it. Step one of finding a solution is admitting there’s a problem, says Bayer, and it’s clear that economics has one.

A thesis penned by UC Berkeley student Alice Wu helped shine a light on the problem. She used machine learning to analyze posts on an anonymous online jobs forum popular with economics.

“She came up with a very convincing case that there was a lot of sexism and a lot of homophobia in the postings on this forum,” says Berkeley professor Martha Olney. “Her research simply codified what lots of people could have told you. But the people who could have told you that were women, people of color, and queer students.”

Once the story was picked up in The New York Times, Wu’s paper made the rounds among some of the most prestigious names in the field, and perhaps more significantly, those just starting out in it. It was a wake-up call.

“It made me reflect a little bit about — ‘Are the people I’m surrounding with thinking those things and just not saying them out loud?’ ” says third-year Ph.D. student Nina Roussille.

Roussille says an aggressive seminar culture alienates some women. One researcher has said that “trying to nail the speaker to the blackboard” isn’t the goal in other disciplines as it often seems to be in economics.

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San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly says called college officials around the country and asked ” ‘What do you think about the Fed?’ And they said it’s an old boys’ club where women wouldn’t be welcome.’ ”

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Ann Saphir/Reuters

Mary Daly is championing the cause of bringing more women into the Fed by stopping leaks earlier in the pipeline. In October, she took over as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. That gave her a vote in the most recent Fed policy meetings this fall.

Like the few other women at the top, Daly routinely offers encouragement through speeches, as she did at a Fed-sponsored symposium for women in economics last year in St. Louis.

“When you show up, you are female and bringing that to the table is just as important as bringing your skill set to the table,” Daly told the audience.

A labor economist, Daly has looked at why more women aren’t in the U.S. workforce. Rising through the ranks over two decades, she grew interested in why there were hardly any women at the Fed itself, even in entry-level roles.

“I called over 250 colleges myself — placement directors, chairs of departments — and said, ‘What do you think of the Fed?’ And they said it’s an old boys’ club where women wouldn’t be welcome. And I said, ‘Let me talk to you more about the Fed.’ “

Her approach worked. The proportion of women in research associate roles at the San Francisco Fed more than doubled, jumping from 20 percent to 50 percent over the past five years.

But bringing them in is one thing. Now the task is getting them to stay — and helping them one day rise to the top of an institution where women remain scarce.

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Amanda Koller is getting her second master’s degree. She has applied for more than 1,100 jobs in the past year. She hasn’t gotten any full-time, permanent job offers.

She is also profoundly deaf.

The unemployment rate among the deaf is staggering. Fewer than 40 percent of those with a hearing disability work full time, according to the Yang-Tan Institute at Cornell University’s analysis of 2016 American Community Survey data. Despite improvements in technology and accommodations that are making it easier for deaf people to work and communicate, deaf job hunters say employers still don’t believe they can do the work.

“I apply to grocery stores and I can’t even get a job there,” said Koller, who lives outside Washington, D.C. “If you can’t hear or speak right, you’re not going to get a job. I don’t think it matters what the company is, or what your background and work experience is.”

On paper, Koller’s background is impressive. She has a master’s degree in public administration from Western Michigan University and a bachelor’s in health sciences from Temple University. She’s currently working toward a second master’s in health care quality management from George Washington University.

Many companies have been interested in interviewing Koller for entry-level positions, she said. That’s where the trouble always started.

When Koller told hiring managers she was deaf and preferred to interview in person so that she could lip-read, she says she was often ghosted or told that a phone screening was mandatory.

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Many companies have been interested in interviewing Koller for entry-level positions, she said. That’s where the trouble always started.

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Madeleine Cook/NPR

Koller has tried to do interviews over a special phone that allows her to speak for herself and read a transcript of what the other person is saying, but the text often lags and the process is time-consuming.

“People get so angry and say, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and they hang up on me,” Koller said.

Koller thinks she’s hitting a wall because of her disability, but she has no way to prove it. Employers often said they went with a candidate who was a “better fit,” without mentioning her deafness.

Each rejection made Koller more determined to get a job. She woke up most days at 5 a.m. to look for jobs and obsessively submitted applications until 9 p.m. She kept an Excel sheet of every job she applied to. She did some consulting work to pay the bills. It wasn’t enough.

Her bank account was negative, her credit cards were overdrawn, her student loans were unpaid. She cried every day and even contemplated suicide.

“I couldn’t see a tomorrow; I couldn’t see a future,” she said. “I was angry about having a hearing loss.”

In October 2017, her significant other coaxed her to go to counseling. That cost more money. Now, the size of Koller’s debt is over $200,000.

Higher education isn’t a guarantee

The same month she started counseling, Koller discovered she was not alone. She was added to a Deaf/HH Job Seeker Network Facebook group, which has 4,700 members. Group members and other deaf individuals NPR spoke with have struggles that echoed Koller’s — they have good educations and many qualifications, yet couldn’t get entry-level jobs.

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Job candidates with disabilities attend Careers & the Disabled magazine’s career expo hosted by Equal Opportunity Publications in Washington, D.C.

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The co-founder of the Facebook group, Ernest Willman, saw this trend firsthand after he graduated in 2016 from Gallaudet University, a historically deaf college in Washington, D.C.

“My class mostly went to go to get master’s,” he said. “Sometimes because we can’t get jobs, we have to get higher education to prove that we can do the job.”

Willman says deaf people still face the stigma that they are stupid or incapable — often referred to as “deaf and dumb.”

Maryam Ameena, also a member of the group, graduated in 2016 from historically deaf college RIT/NTID — Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf — after double majoring in graphic design and visual media. In the two years since, she says she has applied to more than 3,000 jobs.

Now living in Chicago, her dream is to work in a gallery. But these days, she says any job would be good.

She thinks she hasn’t been hired because she has two disabilities.

“Hiring managers were shocked to realize that I was deaf and in a wheelchair. I could see on their faces that they wouldn’t want to hire me,” she said.

Every day she and her deaf friends ask each other, “Have you found a job yet?” Mostly, the answer is no.

So Ameena returned to school. She is working toward her master’s degree in mental health counseling with art therapy at Prescott College. It was a financial risk that involved taking out over $15,000 in loans. She’s waiting to see if the gamble pays off.

RIT/NTID’s career center director, John Macko, said students need to advocate for themselves in every step of the job application.

Finding the right interpreter is a crucial first step for many that Macko said can make a big difference. When a deaf person makes a call on video phone, a sign language interpreter is free — and randomly assigned.

That means the interpreter might not understand the field a student is interviewing in.

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The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that fewer than 40 percent of those with a hearing disability work full time, according to its 2016 American Community Survey.

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Madeleine Cook/NPR

One biology student hung up on nine different interpreters before finding one who knew enough about biology to interpret for her, Macko said. That student received a job offer.

“I’m convinced that if she didn’t hang up the first time, she wouldn’t have gotten the job,” he said.

The challenge of proving discrimination

Proving discrimination as a deaf person can be extremely difficult, according to Howard Rosenblum, CEO of the National Association of the Deaf. Companies might interview a deaf candidate and provide interview accommodations, but won’t actually consider hiring the deaf candidate, he said.

Rosenblum has been a disability discrimination lawyer for more than 26 years. He says he rarely decided to take employment discrimination cases because, he says, instead of admitting discrimination, companies will make up other reasons to explain their hiring decisions.

“They’ll look like they’re following the law,” Rosenblum said. “The law right now is not very effective. The law says you can’t discriminate and must provide reasonable accommodation, but how do you prove discrimination?”

The current law that is supposed to prevent discrimination is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which went into effect in 1992.

In the 26 years since, Rosenblum said it’s unclear whether the ADA has had a significant impact on deaf employment rates.

Technology improvements have made it easier for deaf people to bring attention to their employment struggles and file discrimination lawsuits, though litigating such cases can take years.

Maria Morocco, a supervisory trial attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says that increasingly available accommodations give companies fewer excuses not to hire someone because of a disability.

Currently, the EEOC is working on a nationwide case against FedEx on behalf of roughly 300 deaf workers who charge that they were not provided reasonable accommodations to perform well at their jobs.

A FedEx spokesperson wrote in an email to NPR that the claims are “misleading and not founded in law.”

In 2015, the EEOC filed about 20 lawsuits on behalf of deaf plaintiffs. The total number of discrimination cases the EEOC received that year relating to hearing impairments was 827.

Incentivizing employers

In order for anti-discrimination laws such as the ADA to be effective, Rosenblum proposes two additional measures.

The first is a quota for private employers, similar to the ones that currently exist for the federal government and federal contract employees.

Private companies with federal contracts must hire people with disabilities for 7 percent of their workforce.

Federal agencies have a higher quota of 12 percent, 2 percent of which must have a targeted disability such as deafness, blindness or significant mobility impairments.

Rosenblum would also like to see businesses set up a centralized reasonable accommodation fund (CRAF) to help pay for any accommodations a new employee might need.

“It removes the economic disincentive for hiring workers with disabilities,” he explained. “Different departments may not have the budget for disability accommodations or may try to hire the cheapest people.”

A cause for hope

More than 40 different private companies and government agency employers set up booths and chatted with prospective applicants at Careers & the Disabled magazine’s career expo last November.

At one table, Ryan Walters, a representative from the professional services company Deloitte, sat in his wheelchair and asked an attendee, “Are you familiar with Deloitte?”

Walters has a cochlear implant. So did the attendee.

Though Walters used spoken word, the attendee did not. Luckily, there was an interpreter, provided by Careers & the Disabled magazine.

In every area of the expo, attendees signed to interpreters at various booths, conducting small interviews and introductions.

For Shakeitha Stone, one of dozens of deaf attendees, it was a chance to interview with ease. She cracked a few jokes while discussing a job with the Environmental Protection Agency. Then she stepped away from the EPA booth with a smile.

“I just had my first interview in four years,” she said. “I’m praying, hoping I get a job.”

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SpaceX, the pioneering space technology company led by Elon Musk, will lay off about 10 percent of its more than 6,000 employees.

The news was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

In a statement, a company spokesman confirmed the layoff without specifying how many employees will be released.

“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company,” said the statement. “This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team. … This action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.”

A company source says SpaceX remains financially strong and can continue to “manufacture and launch at a reliable cadence in the years ahead.”

This year the company also will begin “test hops” of Starship, a prototype designed for human travel to Mars, according to the source.

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Underpaid au pairs who have worked in homes across America, taking care of children, often cooking, cleaning, playing chauffeur and providing a range of other duties, will finally receive back pay they say they are owed.

On Wednesday, 15 of the companies authorized by the State Department to recruit young foreigners to provide low-cost child care in U.S. households reached a $65.5 million settlement in a class-action law suit filed by nearly a dozen au pairs in a Denver federal court.

About 100,000 former au pairs who worked in the U.S. between 2009 and 2018 are covered under the deal, which still needs to be approved by the court.

The lawsuit alleged sponsor agencies kept wages artificially low and denied the workers overtime pay. The case was scheduled to proceed to trial on Feb. 25.

“Our argument was that they colluded together to keep their wages well below state and federal minimum wages, and [prospective au pairs] were being told by sponsor agencies that the wages were set and that there was no room to negotiate,” Peter Skinner, a partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, which represented the au pairs, told NPR.

In reality, he continued, “Au pairs have always had the ability to negotiate their salaries under the existing regulations but they were being given incorrect information.”

“We’re pleased that our years of hard work will bring justice to so many young child care workers and fundamentally change the way the au pair industry operates,” Skinner added.

In addition to the monetary compensation, the settlement included a requirement for all companies to provide future au pairs adequate information about their rights under U.S. laws.

David Seligman, director of Denver-based Towards Justice, the advocacy group that filed the lawsuit in 2014, added in a statement: “This settlement, the hard-fought victory of our clients who fought for years on behalf of about 100,000 fellow au pairs, will be perhaps the largest settlement ever on behalf of minimum wage workers and will finally give au pairs the opportunity to seek higher wages and better working conditions.”

According to the lawsuit, agencies falsely claimed that the government set their maximum weekly wage at $195.75 for a 45-hour work week, which breaks down to $4.35 per hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Sponsor agencies have consistently denied the accusations arguing that they follow the State Department’s guidelines which allow families to deduct 40 percent of an au pair’s salary to cover room and board, which they are required to provide. That is how most families arrive at the $195.75 pay check as opposed to $344.38 for 45 hours per week.

“There’s always been one nationwide stipend,” Michael McCarry, director of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, an industry group that represents many of the sponsors, told the Denver Post in 2016.

“[The State Department] has never raised the issue with us about state minimum wage laws,” McCarry noted.

Au pairs are authorized to live and work in the U.S. under the State Department’s J-1 visa program. It was established in 1986 and is described as a cultural exchange, giving participants the opportunity to study, improve their English and learn about the United States. But critics of the program, who say it fosters underpaid labor and that it is rife with abuse, have long argued that it should be administered by the Department of Labor.

“They certainly would do a better job than the Department of State, which doesn’t have experience vetting host families and making sure that abusive host families don’t remain within the program,” Elizabeth Mauldin, policy director at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, told NPR’s Here & Now.

Skinner noted it will likely take several months to track down about 100,000 au pairs who worked in the U.S. over the nine years covered by the law suit.

And although, the settlement did not resolve the central disputes over an appropriate minimum wage for the caregivers or establish the scope of their responsibilities, Skinner said he is confident sponsor agencies will increase their salary guidelines and reevaluate recruitment efforts.

“I am optimistic that they will see it makes economic sense to offer higher wages that attract better skilled au pairs,” Skinner said.

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