The Economist Appoints Its First Female Editor

The Economist announced this week that, for the first time in its 172-year history, a woman will be in charge of the legendarily highbrow financial magazine.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the woman who broke the glass ceiling for thousands of nerdy geopolitically-inclined know-it-all ladies out there (and I consider myself one of them, so this makes me giddy), will replace current editorJohn Micklethwait, who is leaving to run Bloomberg News.

“The Board has chosen Zanny as editor, someone who is a fine leader, with long experience on the paper,” Rupert Pennant-Rea, chairman of The Economist Group, said in a press release. “She will be a true advocate for The Economist and its values.”

The paper’s current business affairs editor, Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after a two-year stint working as an actual economist at the International Monetary Fund. (According to the Financial Times, the two other men on the shortlist were never actual economists.)

Beddoes will be the 17th editor of the magazine, and though you will probably never see her name on any articles due to the paper’s longstanding tradition of never running bylines, she will totally be there, proving that women too can be dry, intellectual white guys talking about crossroads in Indonesia.

[The Guardian]
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

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