Gender inclusivity has become an integral part of central bank policy

At last year’s World Bank/International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings in Marrakech, AFI co-organized a discussion on the role of central banks in advancing social goals. One of the speakers, President Douglas Rodriguez of the Central Bank of El Salvador, highlighted the bank’s role in promoting gender equity, saying “gender is an integral part of our policy.” 

A separate session, co-hosted by Governor Abdellatif Jouahri of the Bank Al-Maghrib and Governor Pablo Hernandez de Cos of the Banco de Espana, called for the gender balance in management positions of central banks to be strengthened. 

I was reminded of these discussions two weeks ago, at an event organized in Skopje by the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia (NBRNM) and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee, where I chaired a panel of five (female) central bank governors, exploring how to advance gender inclusive finance. 

A decade ago, I would have struggled to find five female governors on such a panel, and our conversation would probably not have strayed too far beyond just regulatory barriers. 

Today, however, central banks recognize that achieving gender inclusivity is, as President Rodriguez said, an integral part of their mandates.  

I think this is because it’s now widely understood that gender inclusivity affects everyone and is something where everyone stands to benefit. If central banks are working to increase the representation of women in management roles, it’s because it’s a smart move. Decades of studies show that organizations benefit from having women at the table, seeing increases in productivity, collaboration, and fairness.                                                                  

In Skopje, all five governors highlighted that achieving true gender inclusivity will require us to address legal and socio-cultural, in addition to regulatory, barriers. NBRNM Governor Anita Angelovska Bezhoska stressed that while tackling this broad range of barriers will require activities outside the central bank’s perimeter, “we can lead by example.” 

And all across the AFI network, I see our members leading by example, developing policies that support women’s empowerment while tackling gender-specific barriers to financial access: 

– After the Central Bank of Eswatini introduced mandatory paternity leave, one department went from having no women at all, to having more than 30%. 

– In Ecuador, Superintendencia de la Economía Popular y Solidaria has majority female representation across all levels of the workforce: 55% of the overall workforce, 51% of senior managers, and 67% of Board directors. 

– The Bank of Rwanda started a policy initiative that collects and processes sex-disaggregated data to inform its decision-making, with the aim of expanding women’s access to mobile financial services. 

– The Bank of Ghana created a policy requiring banks to devote at least 30% of their MSME loan portfolio to women-owned businesses. 

Incidentally, Rwanda’s and Ghana’s policies came about as a result of their staff attending the Leadership and Diversity Program for Regulators, set up in 2018 by Women’s World Banking in partnership with Oxford University, and supported by AFI. The program aims to reduce the gender gap in financial institutions, build a pipeline of future women leaders, and develop gender transformative policy responses. 

You can learn more about our members’ efforts to achieve institutional gender parity in our publication, Gender Diversity Within AFI Member Institutions. 

Central banks still have a way to go to achieve true gender inclusivity, but the fast pace of progress and clear sense of commitment gives me hope that in a few years, all-female panels of governors will strike nobody as exceptional.