ContextSpeech by Christine Lagarde at the first networking day for women in healthcare in the Région Sud, organised by the regional health agency in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Why it mattersNot about monetary policy: the ECB President shares concrete lessons on why women stall at each career step and what organisations can change.
- Women are promoted less often than men at each career step.
- The gap compounds as careers progress.
- Role models alone individualise a structural problem.
- Change how organisations measure commitment.
- Share career-building work more fairly.
- Use inclusive job ads and extend campaigns with too few women applicants.
Read the speech summary
1. Symbols rather than leaders
Speaking in Aix-en-Provence at the launch of a regional network of women working in healthcare, the President of the ECB noted that the city's Rotonde fountain, like Marianne or the Statue of Liberty, shows women as allegories rather than as decision-makers. French hospitals illustrate the gap: almost 80% of public hospital staff are women but only about a quarter of directors. The same pattern appears in companies and administrations worldwide.
2. Laws have improved
French married women needed their husband's permission to work until 1965. Today France ranks fourth worldwide in a World Bank index of women's economic rights, and a 2023 law requires 50% of each sex in new senior civil service appointments from 2026, including hospital management. Yet women still feel the path narrowing, because such laws act at the top while the losses start much earlier: in US firms, only 93 women are promoted to first-level manager for every 100 men.
3. Two hidden barriers
The first is availability. Organisations reward people reachable at any hour; Claudia Goldin showed that pay paths split after a first child, as couples often let one partner take the demanding job and the other the flexible one, usually the woman, who then advances more slowly. Women in rich countries do about twice as much unpaid care as men. The second is promotability: women are asked more often, and agree more often, to handle useful but invisible tasks that do little for careers.
4. What organisations can change
Role models help but risk making the problem individual; she recalled working late at night to keep Wednesday afternoons for her sons. Employers should stop treating flexibility as a lack of commitment and reduce the cost of absence through clean handovers, as team-based medicine has done in some specialties. The ECB has set core hours, allows ten consecutive days of home working and discourages emails at night and weekends. Low-visibility tasks should rotate and count for promotion, and targets should apply at every level. Women now hold nearly 40% of ECB senior posts, eight points more than in 2019, though some lower-level targets are missed; recruitment campaigns are extended when under a third of candidates are women. She concluded that such changes rarely come unprompted, which is why networks like this one matter: celebrating a woman mainly for how hard her climb was still means admiring her from below, whereas the real task is to change how commitment is judged and how opportunities are shared.