ECB’s Lagarde, Nagel, Panetta and Knot: ‘We Need to Close the Gender Gap’

7 March 2025

ECB’s Lagarde, Nagel, Panetta and Knot: ‘We Need to Close the Gender Gap’
Claudia Buch, chair of the ECB’s Supervisory Board; Klaas Knot, governor of De Nederlandsche Bank; Joachim Nagel, president of the Deutsche Bundesbank; Fabio Panetta, governor of the Banca d’Italia and Annamaria Lusardi, professor at Stanford University at the ECB's Women's Day Conference on March 7, 2025. Photo by Angela Morant/ECB under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By Marta Vilar – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council members Joachim Nagel, Fabio Panetta, Klaas Knot and President Christine Lagarde said on Friday that the ECB should help close the gender gap in financial literacy.

In an event celebrating Women’s Day at the ECB in Frankfurt, policymakers cited relevant data and made proposals to close the gender gap.

‘Today Europe must address two key challenges: increasing sluggish productivity growth to stay competitive, and maintaining price stability in an increasingly volatile world’, said Lagarde.

‘And improving financial literacy among women can facilitate efforts to address both issues’, she added.

Lagarde announced that the ECB would revisit this issue annually for the next few years in order to raise awareness and foster cooperation about it.

‘This is not a 100-meter run, it is more like a marathon’, said Nagel, who heads the Deutsche Bundesbank. ‘We have to work constantly [so] that this gender gap should be closed.’

Banca d’Italia Governor Panetta argued that underconfidence among women was one of the main drivers of this gender gap.

‘We participate in TV programs, we target hours in which you can reach weaker groups of population, early morning and afternoon, and we introduce the issues not in a professional lecture, but as a conversation’, he said.

After this, the Banca d’Italia conducted an analysis and concluded that financial knowledge improved by 10% among those who watched these TV appearances, and the improvement was larger among women.

De Nederlansche Bank Governor Knot said that closing the gender gap in financial literacy should not only be a cause for women.

‘It should be our cause as well’, he said.

Knot cited a survey conducted by the Dutch central bank that concluded that women in the Netherlands received a 40% lower pension.

‘The reason is that in the Netherlands, for a long time, we had a low participation of women in the labour force’, he said.