Robert Holzmann: Gender, money and finance

Introductory remarks by Dr Robert Holzmann, Governor of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the Austrian central bank, at the 48th OeNB Economics Conference in cooperation with SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum and the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), Vienna, 20 May 2021.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good afternoon everyone!

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the first session of this year's SUERF-JVI-OeNB joint conference on Gender, Money and Finance. I am particularly thankful to the two highly distinguished panelists who have agreed to join me today for this first session on the topic of Gender and Economic Policy-Making. I could hardly imagine any more suitable, outstanding candidates and role models for this panel. Hence, I am both very happy and very honored to be able to welcome Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, and Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund as panelists to this first session.

Our session's title, Gender and Economic Policy-Making, seems to be an appropriate starting point for contextualizing the topic we will discuss on this panel. In fact, the title itself may suggest a unidirectional focus of this session on the range of effects gender can have on economic policymaking, including both policy deliberations and policy decisions. Yet, the impact of economic policy-making on gender diversity and gender parity across the entire universe of socioeconomic and political dimensions certainly constitutes a second, equally valid perspective on our topic today. In her recent book, Gender Equality and Public Policy, Prof Paola Profeta (who will take part as a panelist in Session 2 of this conference), fittingly describes these two perspectives as the political economy angle and the public economics view of the link between gender and economic policy-making respectively.