I hope we can have a constructive discussion about this. I was just informed that in macro, as a male candidate, you will need a JMP with clear top 5/top 3 finance potential to even have a chance to interview with the ECB. The cutoff is lower for female candidates, where you need a paper that could go to a top field (that is where my JMP is headed to, according to my advisers).
That information is of course anecdotal and only making their application & hiring stats public (which they should do) would disprove it, but the ECB is taking a lot of discriminatory actions publicly. They have a 50% quota for female candidates at any level, which is discriminatory in a field with 75%+ male candidates. They organize women-only conferences and Schnabel has said in the FT that positive discrimination is ok.
I do believe that we need to foster diversity in the field, but not at the cost of discriminating against young scholars who are not responsible for how the field has treated minorities in the past. I am not from a privileged background and have struggled to get into a good program, I struggled to get funding. I chose a macro topic because I care about monetary policy and central banking and think that I have the right to choose my field any way I want to. Why am I being excluded from working for or even presenting at the ECB based on my gender?