Washington, D.C.: Today, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its FY 2022–FY 2023 Diversity and Inclusion Report. The report was discussed by the IMF's Executive Board on February 20, 2024. The final version of the report reflects the inputs from the Board's discussions.
Background
The biennial report is prepared by the IMF's Diversity and Inclusion Office in consultation with the Diversity and Inclusion Council. The Council is a Fund-wide representative body that provides guidance to management, department heads, and departmental Diversity Reference Groups on diversity-related matters. The report is published every two years and provides an overview of the institution's efforts to promote a more diverse and inclusive working environment for all employees.
Executive Board Assessment [1]
Directors welcomed the comprehensive and insightful report. While recognizing the primacy of professional excellence in the recruitment and promotion of staff, they strongly supported the diversity and inclusion agenda, and commended the substantial, albeit uneven, progress achieved over the past decade in enhancing gender and geographical diversity among Fund staff, including at the managerial level. They expected the Fund to become a leading institution in terms of diversity and inclusiveness of staff over the next decade. However, while acknowledging the aspirational nature of the FY2025 benchmarks in principle, they were concerned that four out of eight will not be achieved, and noted that meeting the regional URR benchmarks does not capture differences in representation across countries within the region. Directors urged intensified efforts to achieve these targets as soon as practicable, including via the action roadmap for the next two years.
Directors emphasized that a more diverse workforce is fundamental to the ability of the Fund to provide highquality and innovative analysis, advice, and capacity development in a way that gains maximum traction with its membership. Thus, they called for greater ambition by the Fund to instill a culture where diversity and inclusion is valued by staff, managers, and leaders for the benefit of staff at all grade levels. They encouraged staff to continue to raise awareness of the benefits of diversity and inclusion through additional training.
Directors raised concerns that the Fund is only on track to meet half of its FY2025 benchmarks, and that it is not expected to meet either of the genderbased benchmarks, nor meet URR managerial benchmarks for MENA+ and SubSaharan Africa staff. They regretted that recruitment for the augmentation priority areas has not contributed to an increase in diversity so far. Directors noted the lowerthanaverage promotion rate for URR men and women, low shares of women and URR staff in managerial grades, and limited progress with the share of women at the individual contributor (IC) level and called for deeper analysis of the internal and external factors that hinder progress in these areas, together with steps to strengthen the pipeline of women and URR staff for managerial positions.
While recognizing the substantial challenges associated with reaching the remaining benchmarks by FY2025, Directors stressed the importance of maintaining aspirational and ambitious targets as an important signal of the Fund's commitment to making progress towards these targets, rather than lowering or extending existing targets to align with current trends. Many Directors objected to extending the missed benchmarks until 2030. Directors called for a careful consideration of options by the 2030 Benchmarks Working Group. They also encouraged steps to continue to refine the D&I benchmarks, including their granularity, noting differences within regional benchmarks.
A number of Directors called for consideration of broader aspects of diversity than gender and nationality, such as religion, culture, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, age, and gender identity. Directors welcomed the discussion on staff with disabilities in the report, and the deeper analysis currently underway to provide a holistic picture and foster a more inclusive environment. They emphasized the importance of creating an inclusive environment which values and integrates differing views, workstyles, cultural norms, skills, and competencies. Directors urged steadfast implementation of the Racial Equity and Justice Advisory Group (REJAG)'s recommendations to reduce the perception of bias.
Directors underscored the importance of a robust accountability framework for managers that provides oversight over all the four key activities (recruitment, appraisal, promotion, separation) that impact diversity, to ensure the priority actions to address the gaps are effectively implemented. Acknowledging the need to address various obstacles to recruitment of diverse staff, such as limited candidate pools, competition from other IFIs and the private sector, and G4 visa restrictions for certain groups, they emphasized the importance of making greater efforts to attract and retain people with diverse educational backgrounds, linguistic skills, and practical professional experiences, including by increased cooperation with other multilateral institutions to learn from their best practices.
Directors welcomed the expansion of recruitment efforts in URRs, including in high quality universities in different regions. They considered that the lack of heterogeneity in educational and professional background could be a root cause of the lack of overall diversity at the Fund.
Directors called for an increase in gender diversity at the Board and regretted the lack of progress on this front. They strongly supported ongoing efforts by the Working Group on Gender Diversity of the Executive Board and called on all members of the Executive Board to work with their authorities to raise diversity at the Board.
[1] An explanation of any qualifiers used in summing up can be found here: http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/misc/qualifiers.htm .
