European Central Bank as Gendered Actor: The New Normal Unconventional Monetary Policies

Feminist analysis has shown little interest in the European Central Bank as a gendered actor and the distributional effects of unconventional monetary policies. Janet L Yellen, Chair of the US-Federal Reserve, and Yves Mersch, member of the Executive Board of the ECB agree that the ultra-loose monetary policies and low interest rates result in potential economic damage to some parts of society, and potential benefits to others. This Paper uses the insights of feminist macroeconomics to argue that the unconventional monetary policies have a strong asset bias which benefit overwhelmingly the rich. According to this insight, all social institutions and policies emanating from such organizations bear and transmit gender biases. I will develop theoretical concepts such as asset biases to show that monetary and financial sector policy rules are not gender neutral. Asset bias refers to how the European Central Bank’s monetary easing has ‘made the rich richer’ (FT 23.9.2015) by boosting the price of assets. To demonstrate this effect empirically, I will rely on the ECB Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) of 64,000 households from 2010 across 15 Euro member states and extrapolate from these surveys the investment behavior of women and men for risky financial assets (mutual funds, bonds, and shares). I conclude that these tentative findings show that the European Central Bank and its unconventional monetary policies have inscribed a specific gender bias which has different distributional outcomes for women and men (many of whom are wealthy asset owners).