Women in central banking

Sexism in US politics

In this paper, Bisbee et al., use the tenure of Janet Yellen as the first female chair of the Federal Reserve to provide causal evidence of hostile sexism in the U.S. Congress. They analyze the transcripts of every congressional hearing attended by the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 2001 to 2020 and find:

[L]egislators who interacted with both Yellen and at least one other male Fed chair over this period interrupt Yellen more, and interact with her using more aggressive language. Furthermore, we show that having a daughter reduces a legislator’s hostility toward Yellen. These results are not a function of differences in either the content Yellen discusses in these hearings (measured with topic models) or her tone of communication. Our results provide carefully identified evidence of hostile sexism among both male and female legislators when confronted with a female in a novel position of power, supporting a rich literature on gender roles and forms of sexism.

Yellin’ at Yellen
Authors: James Bisbee, Nicolò Fraccaroli, Andreas Kern
From: New York University, Brown University, Georgetown University

Why are women under-represented in central banking?

In this paper Bodea and Kerner use a new dataset on the gender composition of central bank boards in 114 countries for years 1998-2015 to analyze the reasons why women are under-represented in central banks. They are influenced by recent research which shows that female central bankers are less hawkish on inflation than their male counterparts, or at least are perceived as such by the public. The hypothesis they are testing is that in countries where inflation has been a long standing issue and where central banks are independent with no external exchange rate commitment there are few women central bankers. Their findings include:

• Women are better represented in countries without a significant inflationary history, and in countries with a historically politically dependent monetary policymaking, where the personal reputation of central banker matters less to economic outcomes.

Fear of Inflation and Gender Representation in Central Banking
Authors: Cristina Bodea, Andrew Kerner
From: Michigan State University