Türkiye’s central bank governor has been named by Forbes among the women to keep an eye on in 2024.
Hafize Gaye Erkan took the helm of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT) in June after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan named her to be a part of the new economy team to lead a shift to more conventional monetary policymaking.
A former senior U.S.-based bank executive, Erkan is the first woman to lead the Turkish central bank.
Forbes named her among the women whose influence is on the rise.
These also include Claudia Sheinbaum and Xochitl Galvez, the two Mexican nominees who will compete in the June 2024 presidential election.
Regardless of the results, it will mark the first time a woman leads the North American nation.
The list also included Janet Truncale, who will become global accounting firm EY’s global chair and CEO in July 2024.
Alongside Erkan is Michele Bullock, who became the first woman to lead Australia’s central bank in September.
“They’ve also assumed their positions at a moment when high inflationary trends have put economic pressure on both of their countries,” the magazine said.
Erkan, a former Goldman Sachs banker, is tasked with restoring consumer and investor confidence in the Turkish lira. At the same time, Bullock recently told a group of economists in Sydney that it could take another two years for inflation in Australia to drop below 3%.
Erkan has chaired the central bank as it embarked on a 3,150 basis-point tightening cycle since June – including hikes of 500 basis points in the last three months – to cool demand and stem inflation, which is running near 62% and is expected to rise through May next year before dipping.
Erkan’s career spans Wall Street and U.S. corporate boardrooms, and her Ivy League education includes a financial engineering Ph.D. from Princeton.
She joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 as an associate and was named managing director in 2011.
She was at First Republic from 2014 to 2021 in roles that included president, board member and chief investment officer. She was seen as the heir apparent to the bank’s founder and longtime CEO, Jim Herbert, but abruptly resigned in December 2021.
This year, the San Francisco-based lender became the largest U.S. bank to fail since 2008 after it was seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan.
Erkan was a director on the board of Marsh McLennan, a Fortune 500 firm, and was named CEO at Greystone, a real estate finance and investment firm, last year.
The Forbes list also features Denise Dresser and Lidiane Jones. Longtime Salesforce executive, Dresser was appointed CEO of Slack last month. Her predecessor, Jones, will take over as CEO of dating app Bumble in January.
Among others are Fei-Fei Li and Mira Murati.
Li is a co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and the inventor of ImageNet, a database that has proven instrumental in training artificial intelligence systems to recognize images.
She’s long been considered a pioneer in machine learning.
Murati, in the course of one month, went from Open AI chief technology officer (CTO) to interim CEO to unemployed and then back to company CTO amid chaos over company leadership.
Lastly, the list features Reshma Saujani, a founder of Girls Who Code, which she set up in 2012 to grow the number of women in computer science. Over the last 11 years, the organization has educated more than 500,000 girls and women.
Saujani led the organization until 2021, after which she shifted her entrepreneurial energy toward advocating for better family leave and childcare policies in the U.S.
Source: Daily Sabah
