Lagarde

PARIS — Christine Lagarde has traveled tirelessly to save the euro and blazed a trail for women from Chicago to Paris in halls of power long dominated by men.

The French finance minister with a broad grin and long stride now faces her toughest job yet: heading the International Monetary Fund. She takes over a post vacated by a man accused of attempting to rape a New York hotel maid just as the fund is under new pressure to stabilize the global economy.

Lagarde was named Tuesday as Europe hung on tenterhooks to see if Greece can be saved from a default that could quake markets around the world and threaten the future of the euro currency.

While she’s not a trained economist, she has made her mark as the first woman finance minister of a major world economy by surrounding herself with strong advisers — and by using her impeccable English and media savvy to get her message out.

If her past is anything to go by, the former champion swimmer will not blanch at the challenge ahead. Her roll-up-your-sleeves attitude and frank manner set her apart from the lofty figures often found in French politics and the IMF.

In announcing her candidacy, she said she’d bring “all my expertise as a lawyer, a minister, a manager and a woman” to the job.

Lagarde will be able to “hit the ground running” at the IMF because she’s so familiar with one of the fund’s biggest challenges, the European crisis, said Jan Randolph, director of sovereign risk at IHS Global Insight.

Lagarde’s background is in law — experience that may have come in handy as she negotiated the rescues of Greece, Ireland and Portugal in a series of tense, late-night meetings over the past year and a half.

However, Greece’s resurgent problems this year have raised questions about the wisdom of last year’s bailout — and may cast doubt on Lagarde’s crisis management strategy just as she takes over the IMF. Europe’s indecisive and disjointed handling of the Greek crisis has caused the total size of the final bill for taxpayers and international lenders to balloon.

She’s has faced down critics before.

In the 1980s, a law firm in Paris told Lagarde that her sex disqualified her from high office, she has said. So she turned to Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie, where she went on to become the firm’s first female director in 1999.