Heather Boushey

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Heather Boushey (b. 1970, Seattle, WA) is 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. 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.

[edit] 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 writing by feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman, which argued that progess 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. Boushey disputed that such an empirical basis existed, but did not argue with the underlying normative and political strategy recommendations made by Hirshman that women should return to work. The debate between the two scholars was widely covered in the press, including in the American Prospect, the New York Times, and on blogs.