This article focuses on the elites governing central banks in order to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into central bank scientization. We first critically discuss the ‘politics of scientization’ as a discursive strategy that depoliticizes monetary policy under neoliberalism. We then propose an alternative, sociological approach to scientization, defining it as a reconfiguration of power dynamics in favour of the scientific field and asking whether there has been a recent increase in the share of actors from this field in central bank governance. Using global data from our prosopographical database, we analyse the educational and professional backgrounds of central bank governors worldwide from 2000 to 2020. We combine descriptive statistics, geometric data analysis, and qualitative analysis to examine global trends and variations between the Global South and North. Our findings contradict the hypothesis of a linear socio-historical process wherein academic professionals and qualified scholars replace ‘less scientific’ actors from political, bureaucratic, or financial fields. Instead, we reveal diverse dynamics shaping global monetary governance.