Opinion

Taylor Swift, Janet Yellen and Barbie: The Year of

the (Economic) Woman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/26/taylor-swift-janet-yellen-barbie-year-economic-
woman/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJm
IjoxNzA0MzQ0NDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzA1NzI2Nzk5LCJpYXQiOj
E3MDQzNDQ0MDAsImp0aSI6IjJmNGEzMThlLTNmYTQtNDBjZi05OGUzLWY5NjQ3YTA1NzhhM
CIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDIzLzEyLzI2
L3RheWxvci1zd2lmdC1qYW5ldC15ZWxsZW4tYmFyYmllLXllYXItZWNvbm9taWMtd29tYW4vIn0.s
ARMlnNj8SsTbSPkayzgJImVP_1Q7Ijy2OWZ8eFIlB8

By Natasha Sarin
Contributing columnist
December 26, 2023 at 6:15 a.m. EST

1. Taylor Swift
2. Claudia Goldin
3. Barbie
4. Janet L. Yellen
5. Beyoncé
6. Mary Barra
7. The Spanish national soccer team

It has been a rough few years for the U.S. economy. Covid-19 shuttered small
businesses, disrupted supply chains and threatened the livelihoods of the most
vulnerable, and Americans have had to grapple with higher prices. Now,
inflation is falling and unemployment is low, but bruised consumers
remain pessimistic. Experts are trying to understand exactly why the vibes are
so off.

There are good reasons for optimism for better times ahead, and I want to
pause to focus on one of these: In the realm of economics, 2023 was the Year
of Women. Across fields and in uniquely female ways, women drove both
economic growth and our understanding of it. Consider this list — by no
means complete — of 2023 trailblazers:

Taylor Swift
Swift is such an unstoppable force she has been cited in the Federal Reserve’s
“Beige Book” as a boost to regional economic activity when she performs.
World leaders beg her for a tour stop. Her Eras Tour has added nearly $6
billion to the U.S. economy and is certain to wind up the highest-grossing tour
of all time by far, making Swift a billionaire and — most important —
delivering priceless joy to a legion of Swifties.
And I can report this from personal experience: When Swift performs, the
ground literally shakes.
Metaphorically, too, because Swift has shifted the economic plate tectonics of
the entertainment industry. When Ticketmaster flubbed the sales of Eras
concert tickets, an angry Swift — locking arms with her fans — demanded
change. Propelled in part by this Swift-mentum, the problem of pernicious
“junk fees” skyrocketed up the Biden administration’s economic agenda.
Now, prices (and not just for tickets!) are more transparent to consumers when
they shop.
In her song “The Man,” Swift laments that she’s “so sick of running as fast as
I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” She probably could
have. But, by turning the trials of womanhood into a multibillion-dollar
empire, Swift shows that female experience is a force that can’t be overlooked
and, indeed, should be celebrated — ideally alongside thousands of screaming
fans festooned with friendship bracelets.
Claudia Goldin
Goldin was one of my graduate-school advisers, so I’d be keen to celebrate
her any year. But 2023, the year she became the first woman to win the Nobel
Prize in economics as a solo recipient, was something special.
Before Goldin, economists were not much interested in so-called women’s
issues — which is not so surprising, considering there were pretty much no
female economists. When Goldin earned her PhD in 1972 at the University of
Chicago, women made up less than 3 percent of professors in the field. In
1989 — almost two decades later — Harvard made Goldin the first tenured
female member of its economics faculty.
All that trailblazing positioned Goldin to see things that previous economists
had missed. Much of her work grew out of a core insight: As the profession
became interested in the economics of the family in the 1970s, a fairly central
role was absent from its analysis — wives and mothers.
So Goldin wrote that story in a series of papers and a seminal 1990 book,
“Understanding the Gender Gap.” Her research demonstrated the complex
ways in which norms and expectations, social progress and preferences affect
how women participate in labor markets. More recently, she focused on the
importance of flexible workplaces as key to the “grand convergence” needed
to put women and men on more equal playing fields in the labor market.
As we transition out of the covid economy, Goldin’s work teaches that a silver
lining might be an increase in exactly the type of flexibility needed to move us
closer to gender equity.

Barbie
Yes, Barbie is a fictional woman, but she was dreamed up by a real one. In
1959, Ruth Handler created the plastic icon with a small waist, high heels and
(as we all know) quite the bust. Barbie fell out of style in recent decades, and
the company that introduced her to our toy shelves, Mattel, neared
bankruptcy. But in 2023, she made a comeback as the protagonist of the
highest-grossing film of the year, which earned $1.4 billion globally.
Powered by remarkable real-life women — director Greta Gerwig and actress
Margot Robbie — “Barbie” rewrote the Barbie script. Over the decades, the
doll has endured a host of criticism, including that her unrealistic proportions
fueled a body-image crisis in generations of girls. The film embraced and
celebrated all of Barbie’s messiness but also her strength — where else could
young girls look to see themselves as astronauts and Supreme Court justices?
And its syrupy sweetness brought hordes of pink-bedecked women (and men!)
into revenue-starved theaters.
The brilliance of “Barbie” was in the way it leveraged the iconic brand but
turned it into something more — a testament to women who contend with a
host of unrealistic expectations, stumble and persevere against the patriarchy
(which, it turns out, wasn’t just about horses).

Janet L. Yellen
More disclosure: Yellen was my boss at the Treasury Department. But she
would be on anyone’s list of the women who made an economic mark in
2023.
When Yellen graduated from Yale in 1971, department business was
conducted at a private club that didn’t even let women in the doors. She
merely went on to become the first person to hold the three most prestigious
economic policy jobs in the government: treasury secretary (her current gig),
chair of the Federal Reserve and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.
At Treasury, she has been one of the steadiest hands in President Biden’s
steady-handed Cabinet, doing the hard work of implementing complex policy
to improve governance and lives. Her department is charged with carrying out
key aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions. She has
worked with the IRS to secure much-needed funding to help it dramatically
improve service to taxpayers. And she has been a strong messenger for U.S.
economic interests abroad (where she is such an icon that her dinner
orders make news), including a critical sojourn this past summer to China that
focused on how the two countries can productively move forward in an
increasingly interconnected world.

Beyoncé
Beyoncé’s first stadium tour was more than 20 years ago. In the years since,
she has proved her staying power and then some. She spent much of 2023
starring in her Renaissance World Tour, which is projected to add $4.5
billion to the economy. Her economic impact has been dubbed the “Beyoncé
bump,” with her fans flocking particularly to Black-, women- and LGBTQ-
owned businesses.
Renaissance is camp — and pure fun. Queen Bey asked her fans to show up in
silver, and so they do, literally mirroring each other’s joy. A 42-year-old
mother of three, the superstar is also (subtly) sharing lessons about work,
motherhood and strength. She does more than balance her roles; she blends
them: This is her first tour since the birth of her twins, Rumi and Sir, and her
stage is shared proudly with 11-year-old daughter Blue Ivy, who has in the
past been the target of online harassment. Some might be driven out of the
public eye in the face of such abuse. But Beyoncé and Blue Ivy are having
none of that.
Like Swift, Beyoncé released a concert film that is already on track to be one
of the highest-grossing films of the year despite a December opening. But
rejecting the inevitable competition narrative, the two attended each other’s
premieres. Here, too, these superstars altered the mechanics of the industry:
Rather than a major studio distributing their films, they cut out the
middleman, produced them themselves and are distributing them through
AMC, a theater company, rather than a traditional studio. That new model,
powered by a recent shift in antitrust law, is another example of these female
artists exerting their power to control their art, and its profits.

Mary Barra
Barra is one month away from her 10-year anniversary at the helm of General
Motors, and her decennial has been bumpy. She has earned plaudits for a
growth strategy focused on bringing the automaker into the future by
investing in electric vehicles and driverless tech. But that strategy has run into
some roadblocks.
Fewer consumers are embracing electric cars than were expected when Barra
announced that GM would go “all electric by 2035,” and the company has
poured billions into a fleet of driverless cars that were pulled off San
Francisco’s streets after a pedestrian collision. Add to that difficult labor
negotiations with the United Auto Workers, who ultimately secured their
largest compensation gain in recent history but not before negotiations noisily
came to a head this fall.
So why include Barra on this year’s list? Because setbacks reveal character in
leadership.
Barra is the first woman to lead a U.S. automobile manufacturer. She is
steeped in tradition — she began her career at GM as an 18-year-old — but
does not let it bind her to the past. She remains committed to innovation and
the transition to a greener, cleaner economy. As her trajectory this year
illustrates, that transition will be imperfect. But it is essential, and it takes
fortitude to do what must be done.

The Spanish national soccer team

This past summer, Spain won the Women’s World Cup. But the battle for that
victory paled compared with the players’ fight off the field to address a hostile
environment created by coaches who denigrated them and an umbrella
organization unwilling to make investments critical to their success.
Indeed, last year, many of the country’s most promising players asked not to
be called up to the national team until the situation was remedied. The Spanish
football federation resisted change, but some players reached an uneasy truce.
But then, se acabó. (That’s the hashtag for the team’s movement — it
translates to “it’s over”).
When the federation’s then-president, Luis Rubiales, forcibly kissed forward
Jenni Hermoso after the team’s World Cup victory, the players resigned en
masse, Rubiales was forced out and manager Jorge Vilda was fired. Since
then, the women have continued to push for reforms, including advancements
on equal pay. As a symbol of the shift they’ve achieved, the term “women’s
soccer” has been removed from the team’s name. Soccer is soccer, no matter
who plays it.
While we celebrate their accomplishments on and off the field, it’s easy to
forget the sacrifices made to get to this point. Of the 15 women who last fall
demanded change, just three competed in the World Cup. The rest gave up on
the dream of representing their country on the world’s biggest stage — and
the glory of winning!
This World Cup, and all that has followed, is also their triumph. And if you’re
a woman who has ever waged a similar fight, consider it — and all the
progress of this year — your victory, too.