Women in Economics: An Interview with Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria

“We need to fix the issue of girls thinking that they cannot study something with math,” says Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría. She is a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. She talks with Mary Suiter, assistant vice president and economic education officer at the St. Louis Fed, about the economic theory of matching and how it applies to finding a spouse or partner. They also discussed why we need more women in macroeconomics and how we should encourage girls to pursue economics and other fields involving math. “We need to teach them, since they are very little, that they're good at math, that they can learn it, that if they want to, they can do it,” she says, adding that building self-esteem and empowerment is a starting point. “They need to know that they can do it.”