Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Brussels earlier this year. Lagarde says women are underutilized in the global economy. To read the complete interview, check out other resources, and learn more about National Public Radio, please click here.

Photo credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

* * *

Our Women and Wealth series will involve you, too. We’re asking women to share their best lessons about earning, saving, investing or using money. Add your 2 cents at our Tumblr, She Works Her Money.

As the first woman to lead the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde is among an elite group of people determining how money is saved, spent and invested worldwide.

It’s not the first time she’s been a “first.” Lagarde was France’s first female finance minister, and before that, the first woman to chair the global law firm Baker & McKenzie.

As part of NPR’s look at the Changing Lives of Women, Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne spoke with Lagarde about her career and what the IMF is doing to encourage economic growth by promoting women in the workforce.

On the findings of a recent IMF study on women in the workforce

We found out that half the women in the world are not working [in the paid labor force] either because they don’t want to, or, much more often, because they simply can’t work. So, women are underutilized.

The second finding is that women are overexploited. That is, in those places where they work, they generally work in the informal sector. And those employees who either do not get paid, or get paid a lot less than they should be paid, are women.

We found that if females were working in the same proportion as men do, the level of [gross domestic product] in a country like Egypt would be up 34 percent, up 27 percent in a country like India but also up 9 percent in Japan and up 5 percent in the United States. All economies have savings and productivity gains if women have access to the job market. It’s not just a moral, philosophical or equal-opportunity matter. It’s also an economic cause. It just makes economic sense. It’s a no-brainer.

I’ll give you two examples which I found really striking: Japan and [South] Korea. In both those countries the policymakers have decided to put women at the center of their budget and policies going forward. Why is that? Well, first of all, they have aging populations and they need to respond to that problem — they need more people to come to the workforce. They have available talented, well-educated, very often hard-working female workers that they can tap.

* * *

Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

Briefly: Christine Lagarde is the first woman to run the 188-country financial organization and has spent much of her first two years on the job battling the debt crisis in Europe and calling for ailing global economies to accelerate steps for stable growth. Her push for debt-sharing between EU nations and an increase in rescue funds has faced resistance from Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany. French-born Lagarde was a labor and antitrust attorney in the U.S. before a six-year stint as French finance minister; rumor has it she may make a run for the French presidency. Most recently, Lagarde issued a stark warning to the U.S., urging it to raise its congressionally-mandated debt ceiling.