Heather Boushey

Heather Boushey (born 1970, Seattle) is a senior economist with the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. She was formerly a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Her work focuses on the U.S. labor market, social policy, and work and family issues. Dr. Boushey’s work ranges from examinations of current trends in the U.S. labor market and how families balance work and child care needs to how young people have fared in today’s economy and health insurance coverage. She has testified before the U.S. Congress and authored numerous reports and commentaries on issues affecting working families, including the implications of the 1996 welfare reform. She is a co-author of "The State of Working America 2002-3" and "Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families".

Dr. Boushey is a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and on the editorial review board of WorkingUSA and the Journal of Poverty. Her work has appeared in "Dollars & Sense", "In These Times", and "New Labor Forum", and peer-reviewed journals, including "Review of Political Economy" and "National Women’s Studies Association Journal".

During her tenure with the Center for Economic Policy Research she authored a proposal for tax-funded, universal, mandatory kindergarten for all children in America. The leading idea in her proposal is that tax-funded kindergarten for limited segments of the population would create unwanted marginal disincentives. Therefore, a mandate for all children to undergo government-run, federally funded and standardized kindergarten is preferable, Dr. Boushey argued.

Previously, she was at the Economic Policy Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.

On March 31, 2007, Boushey married Todd Tucker, research director of the global trade watch division of Public Citizen, who specializes in the legal, economic and political consequences of trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Interventions in "Mommy Wars"

In response to a series of articles in the "New York Times" that claimed that highly educated women were dropping out of the labor force, Boushey published results of econometric analysis that showed that the opposite was true and that these women - along with women and workers in the economy as a whole - were merely suffering the effects of the U.S. recession and jobless recovery.

This work came around the time of separate writings by washingtonpost.com blogger and Mommy Wars [http://www.mommywars.net] editor Leslie Morgan Steiner [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Morgan_Steiner] and feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman. Hirshman argued that progress towards sexual equality was being stunted by women dropping out of the labor force to raise families, a trend for which Hirshman claimed to have an empirical basis. Steiner's argument was that feminist advances were measured by women's increased range of choices, including to stay home to raise children, not only by job and economic data. Boushey disputed that Hirshman's empirical basis existed. The debate between different feminist factions was widely covered in the press, including in the "American Prospect", the "New York Times", and on blogs such as Steiner's "On Balance" [http://blog.washingtonpost.com/onbalance/] .
* [http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/12/07/optout_hype.php "Opt Out Hype," a paper by Heather Boushey on the Mommy Wars]
* [http://www.cepr.net/publications/opt_out_2005_11.pdf "Are Women Opting Out? Debunking the Myth," A Paper by Heather Boushey on the Mommy Wars]
* [http://www.reason.com/cy/cy122005.shtml Reason Magazine Article on Mommy Wars Debate]
* [http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/09/hirshman Response from Linda Hirshman in "Inside Higher Education"]

References

* [http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=83 Biography and List of Publications by Heather Boushey from CEPR Website]
* [http://www.house.gov/ed_workforce/hearings/107th/21st/welfare92001/boushey.htm Testimony of Heather Boushey before the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the U.S. House of Representatives]
* [http://www.epi.org/author_details.cfm?author_id=120 Publications by Heather Boushey at the Economic Policy Institute]
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801EEDE1130F932A35757C0A9619C8B63]

External links

* [http://www.iaffe.org International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)]
* [http://www.feministeconomics.org Journal of Feminist Economics]