Next Year, the Three Most Powerful Positions in Finance Will Be Held by Women

In 2021, the top three positions in global finance will be held by women, contributing to reach gender equity, shatter the glass ceiling, and encourage the economic empowerment of women.

Janet Yellen, the former first female leader of the US Federal Reserve, who will become the next United States Treasury Secretary, joins the president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva in this top three.

“The IMF has found that the positive economic effects of greater gender equity cover several crucial dimensions of an economy’s performance,” says Lagarde. “It can boost growth, reduce income inequality, help economies diversify their exports, and partly mitigate the economic effects of demographic change. Therefore, even besides the obvious moral and social dimensions, empowering women is an economic ‘no-brainer’.”

The presence of Yellen, Lagarde, and Georgieva in the highest world economic instances might also help create a shift in women’s representation in parliaments – where they only hold 23.7% of seats – and in their access to certain professions, because women only have 75% of men’s economic rights. “We women, especially senior women, we owe it to our children, to our grandchildren, to leave for them a world in which everybody has the opportunity and the right to be who he or she wants to be,” says Georgieva.