Photo Gallery Breaking One Glass Ceiling after Another
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde greets children at SOS Village, a charity group that provides care for orphaned and abandoned children. During her trips abroad, Lagarde has made it part of her routine to have at least one meeting exclusively with women, no matter where she is.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble rolls past his close friend Christine Lagarde. The two have had their splits over policy issues, but they remain close. "When we have time, we also talk about other things," Schäuble says, adding that he sometimes even asks her to concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic.
Lagarde is pictured here entering the Elysee Palace in Paris in 2009 with her partner, French businessman Xavier Giocanti. With her busy travel schedule, Lagarde is able to see him once a month.
The IMF managing director arrives at a meeting in Dec. 2011 in Brasilia with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. No matter who she's dealing with, Lagarde always knows someone who is more important. That's her trump card.
Lagarde's ascent began when she became chairwoman of the American law firm Baker & McKenzie. She met some of the world's most powerful people at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which she attended regularly. She then went into politics, first serving as trade minister and then as agriculture minister. In 2007, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy made her the first woman to head the so-called super-ministry responsible for economics and finance.
She succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the head of the IMF in 2011 after he stepped down amid a sex scandal. In her role as managing director, one of Lagarde's most important jobs has been the Herculean task of trying to save the euro. Here she is pictured with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, center, European Central Bank board member Jörg Asmussen (left) and ECB President Mario Draghi (right).
Last November, Lagarde and Schäuble had a major row over Greece. Lagarde wanted the Europeans to forgive more of Greece's debt than had been planned, but the Europeans refused.
The same month, she famously rolled her eyes on live camera when Euro Group President Jean-Claude Juncker (left), standing next to her, said, to everyone's surprise, that he wanted to give the Greeks more time to pay down their debts.
"As a woman, I have to be true to myself and not pretend that I am a man and should behave like a man," Lagarde says. "Being a woman is neither a handicap nor something to hide."
Here, Lagarde (upper left) can be seen as a school-aged girl together with her father, Robert Lallouette, as well as her brothers, Luc, Olivier and Rémi, in their hometown of Le Havre.
