ECB aims to double women in senior management by 2019
THE EUROPEAN Central Bank (ECB) is introducing a new gender quota for management positions, in the hope of getting more women into senior roles.
Currently, 14 per cent of senior managers and 17 per cent of middle managers are female, but the ECB hopes to raise these figures to 28 and 35 per cent respectively by 2019, doubling the proportion of women.
Of the 18 people who have filled the six positions on the ECB’s executive board since it began in 1998, only two, Austria’s Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell and Sirkka Hamalainen, from Finland, have been women. Currently, the board is staffed by six men.
Sharon Bowles MEP, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, and chair of its economic and monetary affairs committee, said: “The ECB commitment is better than nothing, but too slow”.
The bank has been criticised for imbalances in gender in the past. When Yves Mersch took a vacant seat on the board, Green MEP Sven Giergold called the Bank’s gender makeup “a medieval situation”.