Adviser, Office of Budget and Planning, International Monetary Fund, International

Janet Stotsky is an economist and an expert on gender budgeting, currently serving as an Adviser in the Office of Budget and Planning of the International Monetary Fund. Last June, she contributed an overview article to a special issue of the IMF’s Finance & Development magazine on Women at Work, which analyzes various aspects of women’s work experience—the gains that women have made in equalizing job opportunities and leadership roles and the challenges they still face to achieve genuine equality. The issue also includes a contribution by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde—and short interviews with prominent women in economics and business from around the world on what led to their current success. As an IMF staffer, she has provided advice on fiscal policies to countries all over the world, and has taught at Rutgers and American Universities. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Dr. Stotsky spoke about reducing gender disparities through gender budgeting, which involves the systematic examination of budget programs and policies for their impact on women. This effort to mainstream gender analysis into government policies has gained prominence in recent years, in part thanks to a big push by the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. She will also talk on how gender differences in behavior that are the outcome of private decisions or reflect the influence of public policies may lead to different outcomes in the macroeconomy, with implications for aggregate consumption, investment, and government spending and, hence, national output. Yet fiscal policies are rarely formulated to take account of gender and doing so would improve their quality.