OMFIF’s Gender Balance Index 2026

The OMFIF has released the latest iteration of its Gender Balance Index. Thery summarize its results this way:

For 12 years, OMFIF’s Gender Balance Index has analysed the state of gender parity in leadership roles across the financial sector. This year’s central banks recorded significant gains: Central banks saw the biggest improvements within leadership positions in the index this year.
The number of women governors reached a historic score of 35, six of whom head the regional Federal Reserve Banks.
This is the highest number of women who have led the regional Feds in a single year.Αt a critical moment when US federal and private organisations were under pressure to remove diversity, equity and inclusion information and abandon related initiatives, these trends suggest that progress in gender representation within central banks has continued.

The report reflects the sensibilities and taxonomies of the 2oth century transformation of identity based politics into the economic, social, cultural, and political spheres. And yet at the same time it is a marker of the obsolescence of those taxonomies and their semiotics—that is the obsolescence of the signification of sex and gender within a set of binary significs—male and female; man and woman.

The identity politics of the 20th century and its more formidably powerful insemination of cultural production within the generative fields of negotiations between individuals and collectives respecting the (re) construction of the female and with it the category woman continues. But it has been upended by the explosion of the binaries of the categorizations of the human, and the fusion of biology with its social signification, and then its reconstitution enhanced by advances in technologies, into a fluidity og both biology (that can be chemically and surgically altered); psychology (which can be a bridge between the body and the identity of the mind within a physical body), and the possibilities of multiple existence within physical and virtual spaces.

Read in this way, and in the spirit of the sensibilities of the ruling group within the normative framework of which these initiatives have been crafted, signified and provided pathways for communal interpretation, one might come to wonder whether, indeed, it replicates the hierarchies of sex and gender, and the semiotics of the signification (and constraints) of both within the cognitive cages of a society in which neither sex nor gender easily conforms to the forms and pathways that make reports like this entirely meaningful within its own cognitive normative premises.

More information about the report with links to acquiring a copy is provided below.

 

Gender Balance Index 2026



The time for talking is over: Moving beyond rhetoric

Financial institutions worldwide have made modest but meaningful progress in advancing gender balance in senior leadership – even amid heightened political scrutiny of diversity and inclusion initiatives, according to this year’s OMFIF Gender Balance Index.

The report, now in its 13th edition, analyses the state of gender parity in leadership roles across the financial sector. The 2026 edition explores the journey towards reaching gender balance across central banks, commercial banks, pension funds and sovereign funds, based on data from more than 300 institutions, covering over 6,000 individuals.

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What this report covers: This year's edition features a dedicated in-focus chapter on policy, examining how targeted interventions can accelerate gender balance across financial institutions.
With leading voices in the field, from Galia Borja Gómez, deputy governor of Banco de México, Tea Trumbic, manager of the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project, as well as academics such as Sigtona Halrynjo from the Institute for Social Research and Mariarita Circi, former fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, offering diverse perspectives on policy design and implementation.
At the current pace of progress, it would take an estimated 22 years for the GBI to reach full gender parity. Still, the findings of the GBI 2026 are heartening.