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Born in the hardscrabble coal country of Harlan County, Ky., Kreps completed her undergraduate studies at Kentucky's Berea College, earned a doctorate in economics at Duke, and has specialized in the problems of working women and the aged. Married (to an economist) and the mother of three, she says that the "big problem in being a professional woman with a family is that you simply have less time for the profession." Kreps finds enough time to be in the forefront of the drive to boost U.S. exports. Except in the rarest cases, she opposes the policy of withholding high-technology American exports from countries that flout the Administration's human rights and diplomatic goals.
COURTENAY SLATER, 45, is chief economist at the Commerce Department and one of the Administration's key economic tea-leaf readers. To determine where the economy is going, she pores over mountains of statistics that Commerce collects on trade, inflation, retail sales and other matters. As a student, Slater wanted to become a physicist, but was told by a professor that "women just did not go into physics." After graduating as a history major from Oberlin College and marrying (her husband is a program analyst for the National Science Foundation), Slater decided to enter a field that would lead to Government work, and economics looked right. She finally earned a Ph.D. in economics after a twelve-year slog of night school at American University. In 1967 she joined the staff of the CEA, then moved to the Joint Economic Committee, where she became the senior economist. She calls herself a "pragmatic liberal."
ISABEL V. SAWHILL, 41, is director of the National Commission for Manpower Policy, which advises Congress and the President on employment issues (operators who answer the commission's phones now say, "National Commission for Employment Policy," though Sawhill has not yet been able to make an official change from the rather sexist old name). A native of Washington, D.C., Sawhill received her economics doctorate from New York University, and remembers that she was often the only woman in her classes. She soon found that the best opportunity for advancement was in Government; and, since the late '60s, she has moved from one federal agency to another. Married to John Sawhill, onetime energy czar under President Nixon and now president of her alma mater, N.Y.U., she is the mother of a son, age 18.
Though as a woman she had to overcome prejudice in the past, Sawhill says, "All that is over now. In fact, discrimination today is probably in my favor." A chief concern since she took office in 1977 has been how to achieve price stability with full employment. "Ideologically I'm middle-of-the-road," she says. "There is no way to solve all problems through Government intervention."