Lagarde's call to empower women should resonate

INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde gave a speech on Monday in Los Angeles on what she described as a "global economic game changer": the empowerment of women.

The topic may be a departure from the hard policy issues she usually espouses, but she made clear - at the Glamour magazine Women of the Year luncheon - that the economic payoff and global impact from maximising the potential of girls and women around the world, and promoting gender equality in the workplace and in the community, would be no less significant and powerful than perhaps the best monetary or economic policy decisions. One sensed that the speech - delivered in the US mere days after a historic election that had been widely expected to deliver the country's first woman president - probably had to be amended in the parts where Ms Lagarde talked about the powerful signals from having women in leadership positions, in business and in public office. (She cited just Chancellor Angela Merkel and Myanmar's Aung San Suu-Kyi.)

Sharing details from her personal journey, she highlighted three pivotal "gender moments" (what she called "cracks") that shaped her life: walking away from a top French law firm when she was starting out at 25 - after it told her that she was very good but would never make partner because of her gender; having her partnership at a big law firm in Chicago deferred by one year just because she opted for shorter working hours as she had a newborn; and her gender-related work at the Fund over the past five years.