Though central banks make consequential macroeconomic decisions, little is known about diversity at the helm of these institutions. Our article investigates what factors drive the gender balance in central bank boards. We argue that the lack of diversity in central bank leadership is a function of gender’s impact on individual central bankers’ ability to signal their commitment to price stability to the market, and, that there should be less female representation where the need for individual bankers to project monetary conservatism is greatest. At the same time, the broader social trends noted in the literature on cabinet appointments should increase the political costs of preserving all male central bank boards, and, therefore, the feminization of politics should contribute to gender diversity in bank boards. We thus expect that the incidence of female central bank appointments increases as the number of seats on a central bank board goes up, when more women are represented in politics, and to the extent to which the board is granted more policy discretion, either as a function of its political dependence or by the lack of an external exchange rate commitment. For the estimation we employ a new and comprehensive time-series cross-section dataset on the gender composition of central bank boards in 114 countries for years 1998-2015. We also use a random effects model that accounts for country heterogeneity, and, also, allows us to identify both the within and between-unit effect of our variables. The findings suggest that the political economy of avoiding all-male central bank boards appears in our data to be different from the political economy of achieving more meaningful amounts of female representation. That is, the factors that distinguish countries with all-male boards from the rest are related most importantly to the number of board seats and the extent of female representation in the labor force and in politics. Gender representation beyond the initial female appointment, however is tied more closely to the operation of the central bank, declining in central bank independence and is lower in countries with floating exchange rates, situations that have given central bankers more discretion.