A feminist monetary policy? Monetary governance between technocracy and transformation

Since Janet Yellen and Christine Lagarde have been heading the most powerful central banks, questions within the scholarly community, and sometimes beyond, have been raised whether women do monetary policy differently, or indeed if monetary policy has gendered effects. However, in difference to other areas of financial and economic governance, monetary policy is not only still a man’s world, but seemingly gender neutral in its policies: Even Christine Lagarde, who made significant efforts to bring aspects of gender equality onto the policy agenda of the International Monetary Fund during her directorship, has not raised similar policy proposals at the ECB. At least in the perception of those responsible for it, monetary policy seems to be gender neutral. However, as the literature implies, money can indeed have gendered effects. Yet, these gendered effects can be inconclusive and even contradictory: whereas the problem has long seemed to be one of ‘deflationary bias’ (Schuberth and Young 2011), the more recent expansive monetary policies have also been criticised for increasing gender inequality (Young 2018, Metzger and Young 2020). In this paper, I argue that in addition to empirical challenges, a number of conceptual problems contribute to the difficulty of identifying the gender politics of monetary policy and of thinking through alternative approaches. Firstly, the dominant economistic understanding of money – in particular the commodity view of money, but also some heterodox approaches – limits the conceptual grasp of money’s relation to gender. Regarding money instead as a governance tool (Desan 2014) with its own economic, social and cultural dynamic creates more epistemic space to consider how money and gender relate. And secondly, a narrow view of monetary policy as the decision making of central bank authorities reduces monetary policy to a narrow set of policy priorities. Understanding monetary policy instead in its wider institutional and practical context as monetary governance allows for a clearer appreciation of the gendered politics of money. Together, these conceptual expansions enable a conceptualisation not only of the present gender politics of monetary governance but of possible ‘feminist’ responses that range from reformist to transformative pathways.