Heather Boushey

Her work focuses on the U.S. labor market, social policy, and work and family issues. 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 previously served as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.

She currently sits on the board of the Opportunity Institute and is an associate editor of Feminist Economics and a senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic and Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. Boushey was previously a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and was 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.

Boushey was announced as Chief Economist on the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project following the Democratic National Convention in July 2016.

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. Bureau of Labor Statistics economists Emy Sok and Sharon Cohany found that, in 2005, the participation rate of married mothers with preschoolers was 60%, about 4 percentage points lower than its peak in 1997 and 1998. Economist Saul Hoffman found that, between 1984 and 2004, the presence of children has had a smaller negative impact on the labor force participation of all women aged 25–44 years. This finding confirms Boushey’s report of a declining child penalty. However, this effect varies greatly by marital status: The labor force participation rate of single mothers aged 25–44 years increased 9 percentage points between 1993 and 2000, while the rate for single women aged 25–44 years with children aged 5 years or younger jumped a full 14 percentage points over the same period. In contrast, the labor force participation rate for married mothers increased 1 percentage point, and the rate for married women with children aged 5 years or younger was flat.

On September 13, 2011, Boushey testified before The Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending regarding the latest jobs proposal from President Barack Obama.

On March 31, 2007, Boushey married Todd Tucker, formerly 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).

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.

Heather Marie Boushey (born 1970) is the president and CEO at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank founded to accelerate cutting-edge analysis into whether and how structural changes in the U.S. economy, particularly related to economic inequality, affect economic growth and stability. Her latest book, Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, was called “outstanding” and “piercing” by reviewers and was named one of the best economics books of 2019 by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. She is also the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict and a co-editor of After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking. In August 2016, it was announced that Boushey would have served as Chief Economist of Hillary Clinton's presidential transition team had she won.