International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde offered a hopeful lesson in how to overcome being the only woman in the room, especially in the high-powered male-dominated world of finance and economics, at the Women in the World New York Summit on Thursday.

Interviewed by historian Niall Ferguson, the former French finance minister and top global corporate law executive admitted, as she looked laughingly at a telling photo of herself surrounded by the nearly all-male IMF board, that women still needed “skin as thick as an old crocodile” to get to the top in what is too often a macho world. “I regret to say that the crocodile skin is unfortunately a sine qua non for a period of time,” Lagarde said when asked about what Ferguson termed the current “nasty macho streak in politics” where men were making the most of their masculinity in sometimes embarrassing way.

“But then I very much hope that we can take off the crocodile skin and be normal human beings without having to shield against horrible attacks.” ”

“London is a big financial city, has huge links around Europe and the world, and [Brexit] is one of the risks that we have on the horizon.”

An interconnected world “completely without borders” was a key theme hammered home by the world’s top banker as she spoke of geopolitical risks that have “big economic consequences” — from terrorism to refugees, pandemics and conflicts.”

The IMF used to deal with a world where the Federal Reserve and other central banks had impacts in their countries, but the situation had radically changed over the past year, particularly because of changes in China suddenly having repercussions elsewhere in the world. “The level of risk and the level of interconnectedness is ever so strong … at the same time because of fear, because of uncertainty, because of lack of confidence people are tempted to retire behind their borders and to say: let’s just protect our turf, let’s just be behind our borders, let’s do things at home, and never mind the rest of the world. Well the rest of the world is not at your doorstep it’s with us and we are whether we like it or not massively interconnected.”

The refugee question has personal resonance for Lagarde, especially since the moving experience of visiting the Jordanian Zaatari refugee camp to speak with women whose family members had been killed in the Syrian conflict.

One of the IMF’s missions, alongside the World Bank and other international institutions was therefore to restore stability and help with the economy. “So that once peace has returned — which unfortunately I cannot do much about [as] this is not the mission of the IMF — which is a pre-condition to any economic revival, then clearly it will be our duty together … to actually help it get back on its feet and realize her dream which is to go home touch the ground of Syria and rebuild what spirit she has.”

In further remarks on the pressures bearing down on European leaders and societies amid successive waves of refugees, Lagarde went out of her way praise her friend German Chancellor Angela Merkel for taking the decision last year to welcome more than a million people fleeing conflict and economic hardship. “I want to pay tribute to her because I think … she has taken the moral high ground at that time and she was isolated frankly.”

Recounting a dinner meeting she had with Merkel this week, Lagarde argued there could be hidden benefits to taking the humanitarian decision to allow more refugees to settle in countries like Germany.

The German Chancellor explained to her that the tradition of jealous guarding of information dividing the state and federal governments had been largely broken down since the wave of asylum-seekers from Syria, parts of Africa and South Asia began arriving. “Because of the refugee situation suddenly there is a willingness to actually share information and reconcile databases,” Lagarde said. “And the second benefit is a more united European approach to asylum seekers.”