Managing Director

Institutional context

The International Monetary Fund was established at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. The Managing Director is the senior officer of the institution. By post-war convention the role has been held by a European; from 1946 through 2011, every Managing Director was male.

Career path

Lagarde studied at Université Paris X Nanterre and at Sciences Po Aix. She joined the international law firm Baker & McKenzie in 1981 and was elected its global chair in 1999, the first woman in that role. She entered French government as Minister of Foreign Trade (2005–2007), Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries (2007), and Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry (2007–2011) — the first woman to lead a G7 finance ministry.

Appointment

Following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in May 2011, Lagarde was selected by the IMF Executive Board on 28 June 2011 and took office on 5 July 2011. She was reappointed for a second term in 2016. She resigned from the IMF on 12 September 2019 to take up the Presidency of the European Central Bank.

Tenure

Eight years and two months. Tenure included the European sovereign-debt crisis and the IMF's role in the Greek bailout programmes, the responses to the slowdown in emerging-market economies, and the early phases of the IMF's engagement with global tax-policy reform.

Cluster context

Lagarde's 2011 IMF appointment is in the dataset's slow-rise middle period, but her September 2019 transition to the ECB — a different institution at a different organisational tier — places her at the very front edge of the principal cluster. The same individual being the first woman to head two senior international financial institutions in succession is one of the dataset's clearest examples of network continuity across the cluster boundary.

Sources

• International Monetary Fund — Former Managing Directors
• European Central Bank — Press archive