The international financial institutions (IFIs)—the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and their peers—have long said that gender equality is central to development. Yet CGD research shows a persistent blind spot within these institutions: women are being hired into technical roles at near-parity, but they are not being promoted into leadership at the same rate. This gap is not a diversity headline; it is a governance, effectiveness, and human resources problem that deserves continued, careful tracking and remedial action.

CGD research has previously documented this pattern across a set of IFIs and finds that recruitment pipelines look much more gender equal than leadership rosters. For several IFIs, we find that women are hired into technical and junior professional roles at roughly equal rates to men, but the share of women falls off substantially as you climb the ladder into senior technical, managerial, and executive jobs. That disparity cannot be explained away as a supply problem inside these organizations: the talent is being hired. The problem is what happens after the initial hire.

Read more at: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/meritocracy-matters-and-why-tracking-womens-leadership-ifis-more-important-ever