- Having strong female voices in economics matters
- Women are under-represented in the UK as academic economists
- Female voices are likely to be absent from economic debates
The UK has had three female prime ministers, but there has yet to be a woman Governor of the Bank of England or Chancellor of the Exchequer.
That might change if Labour wins the next election and Rachel Reeves moves into Number 11.
As for the Bank, for the first time there is a majority of women on the Monetary Policy Committee that sets interest rates.
Intellectual diversity is more important than gender in terms of avoiding group-think on the committee, which in the past has been averse to challenge.
But having strong female voices in economics matters – as does encouraging people from less privileged backgrounds to embrace the subject.
Soberingly, a study by the University of Bristol in 2022 found that women are under-represented in the UK as academic economists and that female voices are likely to be absent from economic debates.
Male economists, it said, are more confident in expressing a view than women, even in areas where both are experts.
Old attitudes die hard.
As our sister paper The Mail on Sunday reported yesterday, an investigation into Sexism in the City, due to be published on International Women’s Day on Friday, is likely to find little improvement over the past six years since the last inquiry.
There has been progress in corporate Britain. Leading insurance company Aviva is led by Amanda Blanc, our two biggest telecoms businesses, BT and Vodafone, are run by women and the UK’s flagship engineering firms, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, have female chairs. The water industry is full of women at the top, including Liv Garfield at Severn Trent and Louise Beardmore at United Utilities.
Housebuilder Taylor Wimpey has its first woman CEO in Jennie Daly. They are highly visible, but still a small minority.
Elsewhere in the business world, matters are even less advanced.
Anne Boden, who set up Starling Bank, pointed out that female founders receive just two per cent of all venture capital funding in the UK.
She attributes this shameful statistic to the fact that ‘men in gilets’ aged about 30 call the shots.
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HOW THIS IS MONEY CAN HELP
Middle-aged women like herself do not fit the prevailing image of a ‘techie’ – a young, Zuckerberg-esque male in jeans and a hoodie.
Recent changes to raise the bar on who qualifies as a high net worth individual for the purposes of marketing investments has made the situation even worse.
This has, inadvertently, resulted in stopping women from being ‘angel investors’, which in turn is likely to hit female entrepreneurs who rely on them for funding.
Before she was ousted from NatWest, former boss Alison Rose did sterling work on female entrepreneurs.
She led a government-backed review which found the economy could be boosted by up to £250billion if women started and expanded businesses at the same rate as men. Let’s hope her successor, Paul Thwaite, is supportive of female customers.
In the City, off-putting aspects for women include the macho bonus culture, long-hours, testosterone-fuelled deal-making, and boozy dinners.
Firms run by female CEOs are disproportionately prone to being targeted by activist investors, who may at a subliminal level see a woman boss as an easier target. Wrongly, as several have proved.
Men are more careful about their behaviour and language after some high-profile scandals, including at the CBI and Odey Asset Management.
Yet chauvinist attitudes persist, sometimes unconsciously. Sexism in the 2020s may be subtler, but it is stubborn.
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