The World Bank is being asked to do more to ensure gender parity on its board, which currently only has five female members out of 25.
At the World Bank annual meetings this week, a gender working group, set up by the bank’s board in 2017 to improve the gender balance within the board, launched a gender declaration for better female representation at the board level. They want to see a 40%-50% representation of female executive directors and alternate executive directors — members who can act in place of executive directors when necessary — at the board level within the next two election cycles.
Board members are elected or appointed by member countries, not the World Bank. The current co-chairs, Nathalie Francken and Olga Fuentes, are both alternative executive directors on the board. Francken and Fuentes sent the declaration to leadership on Friday last week and are currently speaking with governors to encourage them to sign. They will have until the end of the year to do so.