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Women Are Missing at Central Banks

Men dominate monetary policy. But the Fed, E.C.B. and Bank of England are discussing ways to promote more women.

Christine Lagarde will become the European Central Bank’s first female president next month — but she will be the only woman on the bank’s 25-member Governing Council.Credit...Filip Singer/EPA, via Shutterstock

FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank might seem an unlikely place to hold a conference on gender equality. Or it might be exactly the kind of place that needs to.

Only one member of the bank’s policymaking Governing Council is a woman — and she recently announced her resignation. The situation is similar at other big central banks. There is only one woman on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Council, and women are a minority at the top echelon of the Federal Reserve.

Realizing that they have a problem, the Fed, Bank of England and European Central Bank joined forces Monday to examine why there are so few women in monetary policy and what can be done about it.

“The underrepresentation of women is perhaps nowhere as visible as in central banks,” said Ana Lamo, a senior economist at the European Central Bank.

There are more women among the teams of staff economists and other experts who prepare the groundwork for monetary policy. Less than one third of the Fed’s economists are women. Still, there is evidence that female economists are less likely to have their economic research published by central banks, that they are less likely to be promoted, and that their careers are more likely than men’s to suffer when they become parents.

The conference in Frankfurt was timely not only because gender discrimination reduces the pool of talent available to formulate the policies needed to fight a worldwide slowdown in growth.

In less than two weeks, Christine Lagarde will become the European Central Bank’s first female president. She will oversee a Governing Council that is openly divided about the bank’s stimulus measures. Ms. Lagarde will be the only woman on the fractious 25-member council at least until a replacement is appointed for Sabine Lautenschläger, a member of the central bank’s six-person Executive Board who resigned last month, effective Oct. 31.

When not trying to head off another financial crisis, Ms. Lagarde, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is expected to make gender a big theme of her eight-year term. The conference at the European Central Bank headquarters Monday, which she did not attend, helped explain why women have trouble rising through the ranks of central banks and other big organizations. It also suggested some remedies.

Outright discrimination is one obvious cause. Laura Hospido, an economist at the Bank of Spain, presented research she did with Carlos Sanz, also from the Spanish central bank, showing that economic papers by women are less likely to be accepted for publication than papers by men.

Deepa D. Datta, an economist at the Fed, examined 3,000 research papers published by the American central bank and found that men were more likely to collaborate with other men on research. Ms. Datta said her study, conducted with Robert Vigfusson of the Fed, didn’t prove that discrimination was at play, though that was an obvious implication. Publishing papers is crucial to career advancement in economics.

Economics is a highly competitive, often unfriendly profession — especially if you’re a woman, according to research presented by Alicia Modestino, an associate professor at Northeastern University.

She, along with Pascaline Dupas and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University and Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, dispatched more than 90 student researchers to economics seminars at leading universities. Armed with a special iPad app, the students secretly tallied the interactions. Women speakers were more likely to be interrupted during the seminar and to face hostile questioning, according to the research.

Numerous speakers said more needs to be done to encourage women to study economics. That is especially a problem for racial minorities, whose problems don’t get enough attention, said Rhonda Sharpe, president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race in Mechanicsville, Va. Only a handful of African-American, Hispanic or Native American women earn economics doctorates, she said.

“The bulk of the conversation centers on white women,” Ms. Sharpe said during a panel discussion.

Ghazala Azmat of Sciences Po, an elite university in Paris, presented research which analyzed advancement at American law firms and was implicitly applicable to any highly competitive profession. Although women joined law firms at the same rate as men, according to the research, they were much less likely to become partners.

One reason was that they became discouraged by negative experiences early in their careers, including sexual harassment. Women who reported being harassed were much less likely to make partner, according to the research conducted with Vicente Cuñat of the London School of Economics and Emeric Henry of Sciences Po.

One young questioner in the audience summarized the problem as “creepy men.” In the pursuit of a career, she asked, “How much can you put up with?”

Iris Bohnet, academic dean at Harvard Kennedy School, cited research showing that orchestras in the United States increased the number of female musicians when they allowed applicants to audition from behind a curtain. Organizations including central banks can achieve the same result by, for example, removing names from résumés and standardizing interview questions.

The Fed has sought to increase its hiring of women and people from minority groups by recruiting from a wider variety of universities and looking at criteria like job experience, not just academic grades. But the Fed is still struggling to increase the number of women at senior levels.

Ms. Lamo of the European Central Bank said that the bank was able to equalize promotion rates for men and women after declaring in 2010 that it wanted to promote diversity. Women were added to selection committees, managers were given hiring targets and women were encouraged to take leadership training programs.

But no one in the conference addressed how to fix the imbalance at the very top of the central banks. That problem is outside their control. The members of policy-setting bodies are chosen by political leaders, who especially in Europe have shown a strong bias in favor of men.

And several speakers at the conference Monday lamented that the audience was overwhelmingly female.

“You’re preaching to the converted,” said Guido Friebel, a professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Jack Ewing writes about business, banking, economics and monetary policy from Frankfurt, and contributes to breaking news coverage. Previously he worked for a decade at BusinessWeek magazine in Frankfurt, where he was European regional editor. More about Jack Ewing

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Missing at the Top of Central Banks? Women. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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