Women's history month: 10 women making history today

4. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund

Francois Lenoir/Reuters
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde attends a Eurogroup meeting ahead of a two-day EU leaders summit in Brussels on March 1.

Christine Lagarde took the helm of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in July 2011, serving as the first female managing director of the organization, which promotes international monetary cooperation and exchange rate stability.
Ms. Lagarde, who has a background in law and formerly served as France’s finance minister, was chosen for the leadership role after the arrest of former head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was accused of sexual assault during a visit to the United States.
As head of the IMF during the eurozone crisis, Lagarde has overseen the multibillion euro bailouts of several European countries and called for the initially unpopular, but now widely supported, mandatory restructuring of debt in European banks.
The outspoken leader has blamed the 2008 global financial crisis in part on the “male-dominated, testosterone-fueled culture” of the international banking industry.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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