In 2017, Inside FRASER featured a list of the women who have served on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) since its inception. In the intervening years, more women have joined the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and become presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks.
This follow-up post provides additional links to those on our list of women of the FOMC 1978-2017 and adds key resources for the five women who have served on the FOMC since then.
Women of the FOMC
Nancy H. Teeters: Board Governor (September 1978–June 1984)
Karen N. Horn: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (May 1982– April 1987)[1]
- Horn’s biography at our sister site FederalReserveHistory.org has been updated with additional details and primary and secondary sources covering her groundbreaking presidency at the Cleveland Fed.
Martha Romayne Seger: Board Governor (July 1984–March 1991)
Susan M. Phillips: Board Governor (December 1991–June 1998)
Cathy E. Minehan: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (July 1994–July 2007)
Janet L. Yellen: Board member (August 1994–February 1997); president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (June 2004–October 2010); Vice Chair of the Board of Governors (October 2010–January 2014); Chair of the Board of Governors (February 2014–February 2018)
- Her 1994 confirmation hearing to become a member of the Board
- Her 2010 confirmation hearing as Vice Chair
- In 2021, Yellen took office as the first woman to serve as secretary of the Treasury.
Alice M. Rivlin: Vice Chair of the Board of Governors (June 1996–July 1999)
Susan Schmidt Bies: Board member (December 2001–March 2007)
Sandra Pianalto: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (February 2003–May 2014)
Elizabeth A. Duke: Board member (August 2008–August 2013)
Sarah Bloom Raskin: Board member (October 2010–March 2014)
Esther L. George: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (October 2011–present)
- George is currently serving as Bank president. Her speeches are available at kansascityfed.org. George will retire in early 2023, once she reaches the mandatory retirement age for Fed Bank presidents.
Loretta J. Mester: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (June 2014–present)
- Mester is currently serving as Bank president. Her speeches are available at clevelandfed.org.
Lael Brainard: Board member (June 2014–present); Vice Chair of the Board of Governors (May 2022–present)
- Her 2014 confirmation hearing
- Brainard is currently serving as a member of the Board. Her speeches are available at federalreserve.gov.
- Video and testimony from her 2022 confirmation hearing
Mary C. Daly: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (October 2018–present)
- Daly is currently serving as Bank president. Her speeches are available at frbsf.org.
- Minutes of her first FOMC meeting as a member of the committee (Prior to becoming president of the San Francisco Fed, Daly served in a variety of positions as an economist at the San Francisco Fed, including director of research. In that role, she also attended FOMC meetings in an advisory capacity.)
- Daly is the first woman to serve as San Francisco Fed president and the first openly gay woman[2] to serve as president of any of the Federal Reserve Banks.
Michelle W. Bowman: Board member (November 2018–present)
- Her confirmation hearing
- Bowman is currently serving as a member of the Board. Her speeches are available at federalreserve.gov.
- Minutes of her first FOMC meeting
Lisa D. Cook: Board member (May 2022–present)
- Cook is currently serving as a member of the Board. Her speeches are available at federalreserve.gov.
- She is the first Black woman[3] to serve on the Board.
Susan M. Collins: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (July 2022–present)
- Collins took office on July 1, 2022. Her welcome message to the First District is available at bostonfed.org.
- She is the first Black woman[4] to serve as president of a Federal Reserve Bank and only the second Black president in the Federal Reserve System, after Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic.
Although the FOMC is the most visible arm of the Fed, women make up a significant percentage of the more than 20,000 employees (see Table D.8) within the Federal Reserve System. Later this month, Lorie Logan, manager of the System Open Market Account for the FOMC, will begin her tenure as president of the Dallas Fed. Although she is the first woman to be officially named president at the Dallas Fed, the torch will be passed by Dallas First Vice President Meredith Black, who has been serving as interim president since October 2021. Helen Holcomb also served two terms as interim president of the Dallas Fed, in 2004-2005 and 2015. In 2021, the San Francisco Fed made history as the first Fed Bank to be led by both a woman president and a woman First Vice President.
Learn more about these and other women in less visible leadership positions within the Fed by browsing our timelines, archival collections, and Federal Reserve themes.
[1] FRASER brings together materials from a wide variety of sources, with the partnership of libraries and archives across the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. government, the country, and the world. In some cases, the original material we would like to make available is no longer available or was never collected in the first place. We thank our colleagues at the Cleveland Fed archives for their assistance in the search for more records of the presidency of Karen Horn.
[2] Binyamin Appelbaum. “She Dropped Out of High School. Now She’s President of the San Francisco Fed.” New York Times, September 14, 2018.
[3] Associated Press. “Senate Approves Lisa Cook as First Black Woman on Federal Reserve Board of Governors.” National Public Radio, May 10, 2022.
[4] Christopher Rugaber and Mark Herz. “Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Names Susan M. Collins as First Black President.” GBH News, February 9, 2022.
© 2022, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
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