Christine Lagarde Thinking Quotations

Think about it. Women control 70 percent of global consumer spending . . . when women do better, economies do better.

Women, as the minority, have to prove their worth all the time. That's the reason we tend to over-prepare, over-study, over-anticipate. I think it's the case with many women leaders. We tend to over do it.

You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

I think I have a male side about me and you have a female side about you. It's a question of repressing or not.

In the area of trading, it is now an academically demonstrated fact that women tend to be a little bit more risk-adverse. They don't move positions as quickly and as erratically as men. Maybe it is a bit less profitably, but I think it would have been less risky.

I hate to say there are female and male ways of dealing with power, because I think each of us has a male and a female part. But based on my own experience, women will tend to be inclusive, to reach out more, to care a little more.

If you have an overwhelming majority of one sex over the other, and clearly in our case at the moment - and it has been like this for a long time - it is male over female, you tend to have group thinking. You tend to have common references, combined with competition, combined in this case with testosterone. I'm not suggesting it's a toxic mix, but I'm saying it needs to be tempered and altered and modified and made better by diversity.

I think there are multiple studies now to demonstrate that diversity, a better balance between genders, but also between different fields as well, is actually conducive to better growth, better bottom line, better results.

When you think of a safe and solid arbitration place, you think of Switzerland, Sweden, Canada. Those attributes may be associated with clichés, but I think they resonate with a lot of people and they are a solid base for Canada to co-operate and help others.