The debate over the presence of women on banknotes, which is very active in some countries, has drawn attention to a number of gender-related issues and is therefore worth analysing in depth. It also sheds light on the issue of the dialogue between citizens and central banks. The paper deals with the presence of female portraits on banknotes and it makes use of an ad-hoc database on 171 countries.
The data confirm that the presence of women on banknotes is rare. Most countries, among those contained in the database, portrayed only men or depicted non-human elements; only Australia and Sweden now achieve gender equality in the images featured on banknotes. In the UK and Canada there have been public campaigns to get more female portraits on banknotes, prompting their central banks to consider the requests to include diversity among the criteria for character selection and to expand public involvement in choosing images.
