The Lagarde Effect: Assessing Policy Change Under the First Female Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a theoretical framework drawing on the literatures of feminist institutionalists and the literature on expertise provided by IOs to examine two areas in the IMF that we might expect to see change under a female Managing Director: increased gender equity among the professional and managerial staff economists at the IMF, and increases in programmes designed to improve women’s economic opportunities through the development of policies to increase female labour force participation. Evidence to support increased gender diversity among IMF staff economists as a result of Lagarde’s appointment is not found, confirming that informal rules in institutions reduce women’s access to positions of power. Increases in the number of IMF policy documents advocating the economic benefits of increased female labour force participation beginning in 2014 were found. These are attributed to Lagarde’s influence over policy documents and the adoption of the World Bank’s discourse on “gender equity as smart economics.”

KEYWORDS:

• International Monetary Fund
• female labour force participation
• Christine Lagarde
• feminist institutionalists
• gender equity

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2019 Annual Midwest Political Science Association, and the 2018 Southwestern Social Science Association. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On 2 July 2019, Lagarde was nominated to be the next president of the European Central Bank. News reports as of 9 July 2019 indicate that she had the support of European officials and she assumed her new position on 1 November 2019 https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2019/07/02/pr19261-statement-imf-managing-director-christine-lagarde-on-nomination-as-president-of-ecb?cid=em-COM-123-39102.

2 On or about 29 September 2017, at the main IMF website I clicked the tab “Research” which brought up this site: http://www.imf.org/external/research/index.aspx. Then I typed female labour force participation. When the search ran, I left the default search full text in place and clicked sort results by date; returning page 1 of 46; for a total of 457 documents. All documents with a published date of 2017 were completed on 23 July 2018.

3 Also, see, Prügl 2017 for a methodological approach of textual analysis.

4 All documents with a published date of 2017 were completed on 23 July 2018. All documents with a published date of 2018 were completed on 7 May 2019.

5 A title only search conducted on 16 October 2017 found only 4 results; a full text search for “female labor force participation” found 457 documents http://www.imf.org/external/ns/search.aspx?hdCountrypage=&NewQuery=%22female+labor+force+participation%22&search=Search&filter_val=N&col=SITENG&collection=SITENG&lan=eng&iso=&requestfrom=country&countryname=&f=.

6 IMF salary structure is differentiated based on Grade; so grades A09-A15 are professional staff and grades B01-B05are in higher pay ranges as managerial staff, see Web Table 3.4 IMF Staff Salary Structure, IMF Annual Report 2016.

7 I would like to thank Autumn Payton for pointing this out, as well as the suggestion to count the overall number of documents for each year. Unfortunately, when I began this task on 29 April 2019, the same search for female labour force participation yielded 2138 documents, listed as p. 1–100. Owing to a variety of factors, including documents released for 2018 and part of 2019 that were not included in the prior search, complete totals for each year were only available for 2015–2018; documents with a date of 2014 ended on p.100 which was the end of the search. The number of documents mentioning FLFP, as a percent of total documents is 2014 (14%), 2015 (10%), 2016 (19%), 2017 (16%) and 2018 (12%). There was no information provided on documents earlier than 2014, see the following link https://www.imf.org/en/search#q=%20female%20labor%20force%20participation&sort=%40imfdate%20descending.

8 The phone interview occurred on 20 July 2018. While I do not want to disclose the identity of this economist s/he has published research on the topics of gender and the benefits of gender equality for economic growth.

9 S/he was also a prominent author of this document. Also, see, Franceschet 2017, 121, for the benefits of elite interviews in “ … revealing informal rules and the gendered consequences of both informal rules informally”.

10 The speech is on line at http://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp102215.

11 Interview of Christine Lagarde by Trevor Noah, on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on 17 June 2019, available at http://www.cc.com/episodes/f71jdl/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-extended---june-17–2019---christine-lagarde-season-24-ep-24119.

12 Detailed information on names of female Executive Directors, the countries they represented and the dates they served was provided by an IMF official.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela Blackmon

Pamela Blackmon is an associate professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona. Her research areas include international political economy with a focus on the international financial and trade institutions. She is the author of The Political Economy of Trade Finance (Routledge, 2017) and In the Shadow of Russia (Michigan State University Press, 2011). She has also published articles in International Studies Review, Third World Quarterly and The International Trade Journal among others.