FRANKFURT — European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has called on European leaders to ensure female representation in its top ranks as they embark on a major reshuffle of the Bank’s Executive Board.
Four of the ECB’s six board seats are up for rotation in the next two years. Vice President Luis de Guindos will be the first to leave Frankfurt in May, followed by Chief Economist Philip Lane, Lagarde, and Head of Market Operations Isabel Schnabel in 2027. The other two members, Frank Elderson and Piero Cipollone, will stay until end-2028 and 2031, respectively.
“I strongly encourage political leaders to ensure that women are properly represented among the ECB’s leadership,” Lagarde told POLITICO in an emailed statement, a week before the Eurogroup formally begins the search for a new vice president.
Lagarde stressed that diversity improves decision-making by allowing different perspectives to be included.
“There are qualified candidates today, and the role models these women provide will ensure many more candidates in the future, to the benefit of Europe’s resilience,” she said.
The current list of rumored candidates for Lagarde’s job, however, doesn’t include a single woman. For the vice-presidency there have been five serious candidates — and all but one are men.
While officials involved in discussions told POLITICO that European leaders are keen to ensure that the number of women on the Executive Board doesn’t drop below two, two central bankers shared concerns that the pool of qualified women remains too small.
It’s a man’s world (in the eurozone)
Women have made big strides in central banking across most of the world in recent years: Janet Yellen and Lael Brainard have had distinguished spells at the top of the U.S. Federal Reserve; five of the nine current members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee are female, including two deputy governors. Australia and New Zealand both have female governors. And Elvira Nabiullina at the Central Bank of Russia has kept hyperinflation at bay despite the pressures of a war that is now nearly four years old.
But in the eurozone, male dominance has hardly wavered. Since the launch of the euro in 1999, only one woman has led a national central bank — Cyprus’ Chrystalla Georghadji. The Executive Board has only done slightly better and has had one woman on it for most of its 26 years.
Lagarde captured the situation well in a photo she tweeted in November 2019, showing herself surrounded by her all-male colleagues. The only other women in the room were in paintings on the wall.
While she has no formal powers over the appointments, Lagarde said she has battled for change. “When there is a vacancy, I can raise my voice. I can pick up the phone. I can impress upon them that it’s a bit ridiculous to have out of 25 members only two women,” she told the New York Times in 2020.
But so far those on the other end of the line have failed to step up. Eight eurozone countries have had the chance to appoint a woman to their governorships over the last 18 months; none has taken it.
It doesn’t help that progress at lower levels of management, which would build up a strong pipeline of qualified women, has remained slow.
The number of female deputy governors at the eurozone’s national central banks has risen to 14 out of 34, but few are entrusted with key monetary policy responsibilities. When Bank of Finland Governor Olli Rehn took a leave of absence in 2023, his female deputy Marja Nykänen was named acting governor, but it was his male board member Tuomas Välimäki that got to attend Governing Council meetings. At last year’s meeting only between two and five women were among the 20 accompanying persons sitting in on policy meetings.
Still, there are several women who appear well-suited to the board seats that will soon become vacant. The Bank of Greece’s Christina Papaconstantinou is seen as a serious contender for the vice-presidency, although her experience in monetary policy is limited. Her chances, inevitably, also depend on whether Greece’s Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis will secure the Eurogroup presidency. That post will be decided just hours before the ECB race begins.
Another rumored candidate for the vice-presidency was the Bank of Portugal’s Clara Raposo. However, her ambitions were thwarted by her former boss Mário Centeno, who put his name forward before the Portuguese government could make up its mind.
If the vice-presidency goes to a man, the pressure will be on Germany, France and Spain — which haven’t put forward a candidate for the No. 2 spot — to suggest women for the remaining three positions.
France, which has its eye on the chief economist post, has a number of candidates up its sleeve, including Bank of France Deputy Governor Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, the London School of Economics’ Hélène Rey, and Laurence Boone, a former Europe affairs minister and chief economist for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The front-runners from Germany and Spain, by contrast, are men.
Lagarde: Leaders must ensure female presence in ECB leadership
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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