In other words, are women being promoted because of their gender or because they are the best candidate irrespective of their gender? After being promoted, women’s wage progression is, on average, faster than men’s. This suggests that the women selected for promotion perform better.6  Allow me to focus on my organisation now. As I said earlier, the Banco de España currently has a gender-equal workforce, with the share of women having gradually risen from 30% at the end of the 1980s. Significant momentum was gained in the mid-2000s, coinciding with greater awareness about the advantages of gender diversity. However, at that point no specific policy geared towards increasing women’s presence was implemented. Instead it came about ‘naturally’. Despite the workforce parity achieved, there are still sizeable differences across professional groups: in 2019, women accounted for 40% of managerial staff, 46% of senior experts, 52% of experts and specialists, 66% of administrative staff and 11% of other support services staff. 6  The criticism that this could be to compensate for prior wage gaps after the diversity policy was ushered in also appears to be baseless since women’s relatively quicker salary increases after promotion were faster still pre-2011. 6  This recent momentum was above all due to women making up a relatively larger share of new entrants joining the Bank (see centre panel). Logically, among the most experienced staff, the relative share of women has increased at a much slower pace (see right-hand panel).
But it would be disappointing if that debate degenerates into recrimination and antagonism. That would be to obscure the remarkable consensus that now exists - throughout the European Union and indeed more widely, and across a broad spectrum of political opinion within the countries of Europe, including this country, on the broad approach to macro-economic management. This unforced consensus extends to monetary policy directed to price stability, and it extends to budgetary policy directed to medium and longer-term fiscal sustainability. There is growing recognition, too, across the continent, of the importance of structural policy directed to supply-side flexibility. This strengthening consensus is fundamentally important - more fundamentally important, in terms of the economics of it at least, than whether these common objectives are pursued inside or outside the framework of monetary union. Pulling these thoughts together, it would be a mistake in my view for monetary union to go ahead without reasonable confidence of genuine, sustainable, convergence between its members; and it would be a mistake for any individual country to seek to join, or to be permitted to join, unless it had achieved genuine, sustainable, convergence. If there are serious doubts - generally or in any particular case - it would be in no-one’s interest to proceed. But it would be just as big a mistake, if monetary union does not go ahead, or for countries on the outside, if individual governments saw that as an opportunity to seek to take short-term advantage of the apparent macro-economic freedom that that gave.