Beatrice Weder di Mauro

Economist

My passion for football: The passionate climber and mountaineer has a fundamentally positive relationship with sport and appreciates from her own experience the importance of recognising and promoting women’s achievements, especially in the hugely popular sport of football.

I’m looking forward to the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2011™ because... "it can help to spark a national mood just as positive as it was for the men’s World Cup in 2006. For German society, that would provide a not-to-be-underestimated and welcome boost, and not merely from an economic perspective: it could again prove very effective around the world in image terms."

Career highlights: After graduating from high school in Switzerland and studying economics in Basel, she was an economist at the International Monetary Fund from 1994 to 1996, and at the World Bank in 1996-7. She returned to Basel as a Professor, lecturing at many Universities around the world. She has been a Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz since 2001. In 2004, she was appointed to the German Council of Economic Experts (Deutschen Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung), the first woman and the first non-German to sit on the highly-respected expert panel.