(Bloomberg) -- Switzerland’s government should take into account qualified women inside the Swiss National Bank for promotion to its top echelon, according to an academic close to the institution’s current chief.

“If the SNB can present a convincing internal female candidate, it would be strange not to seriously consider that,” Ernst Baltensperger, a professor emeritus at the University of Bern, wrote in an op-ed in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung.   

Baltensperger oversaw the doctoral thesis of Thomas Jordan, who is set to exit the SNB at the end of September after more than 12 years as its president. 

That coming shift at the highest level of management could herald a changing of the guard at the central bank, which has only ever had one female rate setter and where the three top jobs are at present all held by men. 

Should custom prevail, Vice President Martin Schlegel will succeed Jordan, freeing up a seat on the Governing Board. That could open the door to Petra Tschudin, currently the only woman on the Enlarged Governing Board, to fill that post.

Baltensperger’s NZZ op-eds have proven repeatedly prescient in the past. He publicly advised the central bank to loosen its cap on the franc in 2015 just days before it then scrapped the policy, and in June 2022, he wrote that it’s time for the SNB to raise borrowing costs a day before it then did so in a surprise move. 

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