Guess, who rule the financial world? With the appointment of Kolkata-born Indian-American economist Gita Gopinath as the first female Chief Economist of International Monetary Fund (IMF), women are the big bosses now. It is not just IMF which has named a female as its chief economist. In April, the World Bank Group also appointed Pinelopi Koujianou, Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University, as the chief economist. Later in June, Laurence Boone, then chief economist at insurer AXA and a former adviser to President Francois Hollande, was appointed as the chief economist at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Hence, with the appointment of Gopinath (who is a US citizen and an Overseas Citizen of India) as chief economist at IMF, women now hold key positions in three esteemed establishments in the world.
Gopinath received her doctorate in economics in 2001 from Princeton University. She earned a BA degree from the University of Delhi and MA from both the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington. Gopinath, who first made headlines a few years ago after she became the third woman to be a tenured full professor at Harvard, is the first woman and second Indian after former the Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan to hold the prestigious position at IMF.
Gita Gopinath is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics at Harvard University and before coming to Harvard, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, according to the information available on Harvard University’s website.
