Courtenay Slater
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Courtenay Murphy Slater (1933–2017) was an American economist who became Chief Economist in the United States Department of Commerce in the late 1970s, under president Jimmy Carter.[1]
Slater was born in Durham, North Carolina, on July 23, 1933, and moved to Maryland with her family as a child. After attending Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland,[1] she became an undergraduate at Oberlin College. Initially hoping to go into science, she was told by a professor that "women just did not go into physics",[2] and instead graduated with a degree in history in 1955.[3]
She married Whitney Slater, a fellow Oberlin student who came to work for the Naval Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.[4] After working as a junior high school teacher for a year, she became a housewife and began what would turn out to be "a twelve-year slog of night school"[2] in graduate study of economics at American University in Washington, D.C. She earned a master's degree there in 1965 and completed her doctorate in 1968.[3]