How Diverse Is the International Monetary Fund?

Relying on a new International Monetary Fund report, Bloomberg takes a look at how diverse the IMF is:

While IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has made diversity at the Washington-based IMF a priority, the institution has some catching up to do. As of the end of 2012, women at the fund held 22 percent of management jobs, compared with 37 percent at the World Bank and 34 percent at the Inter-American Development Bank, according to today’s report. The IMF aims to have 25 percent to 30 percent of women in management by the end of this fiscal year…

The Bloomberg account also notes the report’s data on geographic diversity:

The fiscal 2014 target for managers from Africa is 6 percent, which compares with a 2013 rate of 4.8 percent. East Asians made up 5.7 percent of managers, 1.3 percentage points under the objective. At 2.1 percent, emerging Europe is 1.9 percentage points short of the 4 percent target. Only the Middle East’s 5.4 percent already surpassed a 5 percent goal.

But perhaps the most interesting area of the IMF report is one the Bloomberg story skips over: the educational backgrounds and professional training of IMF employees. The more powerful critique of the Fund is not that its employees all look the same, but that they mostly think alike, having been educated at a small group of elite Western universities. The report acknowledges the issue:

For a knowledge institution like the Fund, an important expression of inclusion is diversity of thought. The basic premise is that by allowing differing viewpoints to be voiced and heard, groups can engage in more creative and innovative approaches and ultimately produce "better" solutions.

The report doesn’t specify the educational institutions that IMF staff attended, but it does identify the country where staffers received their advanced degrees. The United States dominates; more than 60 percent of Fund staff with PhDs received their doctorates from American universities. Another twenty percent studied at universities in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy. Voting weight at the IMF may be very slowly migrating toward the emerging powers and developing world, but the minds of IMF staff are being shaped in the West.