Janet Louise Yellen was born in Brooklyn, New York, beginning the life of a future trailblazing American economist and public servant.
On August 13, 1946, Janet Louise Yellen was born in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Julius Yellen, a physician, and Anna Ruth Blumenthal Yellen, a former schoolteacher. She grew up in a modest, intellectually engaged household that emphasized education and civic engagement.
Yellen excelled academically from an early age, graduating as valedictorian of Fort Hamilton High School. She went on to attend Brown University, graduating summa cum laude in 1967 with a degree in economics, before pursuing doctoral studies at Yale University under the mentorship of Nobel laureate James Tobin.
Though her birth itself was not a public event, it marks the starting point of a life that would fundamentally reshape assumptions about who could lead the most powerful economic institutions in the United States. Decades later, Yellen would become the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve and the first woman to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary, making her early life and formative education significant chapters in the broader history of women's advancement in economics and public policy.