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For outsiders Central Banks might easily seem like an "old boys club". When we looked at the composition of governing boards of EU states CBs, we found only 21,4 % members were female. And not a single governor of an EU central bank is a woman. What's up with that? A thread.
Of course, globally there are examples of females Central Bankers on the top OF the game. @Lagarde is certainly one. Janet Yellen is another.
But it's hard to shake the feeling of something being wrong when, in observation shared with me by @mh0rvath the other day, there are more ladies on the paintings decorating the room where top European central bankers are dining than actual live women sitting by the table.
So me and my colleague Eva Štulrajterová, sadly not on Twitter, have gone through the pain of downloading CVs and reconstructing career information about as many board members of European central banks as we were able to find online.
We found the male and female central bankers are quite similar in terms of education (about half of both M and F board members has a PhD) and in terms of work experience (about 25 years on average for both sexes).
But there are some important differences. Nearly 80 % of male board members graduated in maths or econ. Female board members are much more likely to come from non-econ background such as law or social science.
Women are also more likely to have made their career in the EU Commission or IMF while men are somewhat more likely to be promoted from withing the organization (bars represent share of years worked in individual sectors on the total years of work experience from men and women)
Our best guess is thus that A way to get a more equal representation of both sexes on the CB boards lies in (i) increasing the share of female students of economics, particularly macroeconomics and (ii) studying best practices of international organizations.
Of course, as always, that's not likely to be the entire answer, more robust analysis is obviously needed etc.
But perhaps our little exercise can provide some food for thought. After all, as the famous (female) economist Joan Robinson said: "economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans"
