Women and leadership: widening the pipeline
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Christine Lagarde<br>The President of the European Central Bank
SPEECH<br>Women and leadership: widening the pipeline
Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the first Journée de réseaux de femmes dans la santé en Région Sud in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur organised by Agence Régionale de Santé in Aix-en-Provence, France<br>Aix-en-Provence, 4 June 2026<br>It is a pleasure to be here in Aix-en-Provence to mark the launch of Essenti'Elles Santé for Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Today is about the women who are shaping healthcare in this region.<br>For most of history, societies have been readier to raise women up as symbols than to let them lead.<br>We do not have to look far for an example. Aix’s most famous landmark, the Fontaine de la Rotonde, is crowned by three female figures: Justice, Agriculture and the Fine Arts – symbols of this city's highest aspirations when it was built in the mid-nineteenth century.<br>You will find such figures on monuments across France and well beyond it: Marianne presides over our town halls; Liberty raises her torch above the harbour of New York. Societies have long chosen women to embody their loftiest ideals.<br>But always as allegories. The women carved above the doorway were not, as a rule, the people admitted through it. What about women as leaders?<br>In healthcare, that question is especially sharp.<br>Healthcare is one of the most feminised sectors in the French economy. Women are in the majority at every stage of initial health training. In France’s public hospitals almost 80% of staff are female. Yet only around one-quarter of hospital directors are women.<br>The challenges facing women in the French healthcare sector are a window onto something much broader.<br>The same pattern is visible in private firms and public administrations worldwide: women enter the workforce in abundance, but the pipeline to leadership narrows more sharply for them than it does for men.<br>Today I would like to explore why that pipeline narrows, and what it takes to widen it.<br>Why the pipeline narrows<br>For much of history, legal barriers kept women out of leadership entirely, or made access conditional in ways that did not apply to men. And this is within living memory. When I was a child, French women still needed their husbands’ consent to work. That changed only in 1965.[1]<br>The France of today is a far cry from the France of my childhood – thankfully.<br>The legal picture has changed for the better in recent decades. The emphasis has shifted from removing prohibitions to actively encouraging women’s access to senior leadership. And here, France has gone further than most countries.<br>A major reform in 2023 is one example. It raised the required share of each gender in new appointments to senior civil service posts from 40% to 50%, which took effect at the start of this year. That includes senior posts in public hospitals.[2]<br>This is genuine progress. And it helps to explain why, earlier this year, France ranked fourth in an international index of legal rights underpinning women’s economic participation.[3]<br>And yet, if you ask women navigating their careers today whether they feel that progress, the answer is far more ambivalent. In their experience, the pipeline still narrows, suggesting there is a mismatch between the letter of the law and everyday experience.<br>Why? Laws of this kind tend to operate towards the top of the pipeline, while the narrowing starts much further down.<br>In this respect, a recent report on corporate America reveals a pattern that will be familiar to many women in this room.<br>It is the first promotion – the step-up from entry level to manager – where women already begin to fall behind. For every 100 men promoted at that step, only 93 women are promoted.[4] The shortfall is modest at first, but it compounds at every step above.<br>To explain why, we have to look beyond the law – at how organisations traditionally reward work and how they distribute it. And here, there are two key barriers that narrow the pipeline more sharply for women than for men: availability and promotability.<br>Let me touch on the first.<br>Across many organisations today, the rewards still go to those who work long, unpredictable hours: the person who can stay late and be reached at short notice. The person who is, in a word, available.<br>The work of the Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin is illuminating here. She has shown that women’s and men’s earnings paths diverge after the birth of their first child.[5]<br>For many couples, there has been a financial incentive to specialise: one partner takes the role that demands constant availability, while the other...