Short answers, pulled from the story.
Janet Yellen served as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999, chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, and as the 78th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 2021 to 2025. She is the only person in American history to have led all three of the country's most powerful economic institutions.
Yes. Janet Yellen was confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve on the 6th of January 2014, by a vote of 56-26, and was sworn in on the 3rd of February 2014. She was the first woman to lead the American central bank, and only the second woman to lead a G8 central bank, after Russia's Elvira Nabiullina.
Janet Yellen was born on the 13th of August 1946, and grew up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She graduated as valedictorian from Fort Hamilton High School in 1963, earned her bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Brown University in 1967, and completed her Ph.D. in economics at Yale University in 1971.
Janet Yellen is married to economist George Akerlof, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001. They met in the cafeteria of the Federal Reserve Board in the fall of 1977 and married in June 1978. Akerlof is also a professor at Georgetown University and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley.
During Yellen's term as Fed chair from 2014 to 2018, the U.S. unemployment rate fell from 6.7 percent to 4.1 percent, a decline of 2.6 percentage points. That was the largest drop in unemployment under any Federal Reserve chair in the post-World War II era, and for the first time in the Fed's history the economy added jobs in every single month of a chair's full tenure.
The fair wage effort hypothesis is an economic theory developed by Yellen and her husband George Akerlof, published in their 1990 paper "The Fair-Wage Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment." It argues that workers who believe they are paid less than a fair wage will deliberately reduce their effort as a form of retaliation against their employer. The paper also introduced the gift-exchange game as a framework for understanding workplace productivity.