“Women can do anything.”  So said Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, when asked recently to comment on the significance of  Janet Yellen’s appointment to head the Federal Reserve.  Of course, we wholeheartedly agree.  These two women now sit at the top of the international financial world and usher in a new era for women in finance.  A step in the right direction, we think.

A few facts about Janet Yellen, along with some thoughts from two former colleagues, a professor and a congressman:

• Yellen became interested in economics as a way of thinking logically about how to help people.

• “She makes an argument on the merits and she sticks with it,” said Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor about Yellen. “And she’s good at articulating an argument in a way that doesn’t leave people on the other side hopping mad at her.”

• Kevin Hassett, a staff economist at the Fed when Ms. Yellen arrived in 1994, recalled that she started to eat lunch regularly in the staff cafeteria to subvert the hierarchical system that limited communication between Fed governors and the vast army of research economists. Other governors had tried to change the rules but Ms. Yellen, he said, found a way around them. “It showed a kind of grace and wisdom that is very unusual in Washington,” said Mr. Hassett.

• She studied at Yale under the Nobel laureate James Tobin, who said that Yellen had “a genius for expressing complicated arguments simply and clearly.”

• During a recent marathon appearance before the House Financial Services Committee, a congressman told Yellen she was “smart, steady and not very exciting,” to which Yellen replied,  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

Read more on Yellen’s appointment in Forbes here, and in The Week here.

*above quotes from The New York Times and Forbes.