Rachel Reeves is ready to become Britain’s first female chancellor and rewrite history
The chancellor of the exchequer role has existed for more than 700 years, and women have been in parliament for 104 of those. We have had three female prime ministers (whatever we may make of their respective legacies), yet to date – until now – never a female chancellor. Why should that be?
"The truth is, when people picture what a chancellor looks like, they have in their heads a picture of a man," says Rachel Reeves MP, who is hoping to turn the tide of history and take charge of the nation’s finances. "That’s partly because since entering politics, women have been encouraged to focus on social and domestic issues — things like equal pay and childcare, which are vital because they didn’t previously have a champion. But as a result, we’re at risk of being pigeonholed, and expected to leave the other issues to men."
Reeves, who speaks to me from her Westminster office, is arguably more qualified than any other recent candidate to take on the chancellorship. A keen chess player (she was the under-14s girls’ champion as a child), Oxford PPE graduate and trained economist who started her career at the Bank of England, she lives and breathes numbers, but that’s not to suggest she’s short on human compassion. Her interest in politics, she says, arose while she was still at school, initially after seeing her mother, a special-needs expert, have to convert to classroom teaching because her funding was taken away, and then more seriously when, as a state-school sixth-former, she became frustrated by the obvious negative impact of Conservative cuts to public finances on her surroundings. "I remember we were based in two prefab huts in the playground that were freezing in winter and baking in summer, with windows that didn’t open properly," she says. "Then our school library got turned into a classroom because there wasn’t enough space. I was very studious and wanted to do well, but I felt like the odds were stacked against me." Rather than simply grumble about her circumstances, she joined the Labour Party, attracted by Tony Blair’s mantra of ‘Education, education, education’, and started campaigning at weekends.
The repeated experience of being one of only a few women in her space — first in the financial industry, and latterly when she entered parliament — seems not to have deterred her from making her voice heard. Being a competitive chess player may, Reeves suggests, have helped prepare her to thrive when outnumbered. "It was always incredibly male-dominated," she says. "I must have been about seven or eight when, at a chess tournament, I overheard someone come up to the boy I’d been drawn against and say, 'Oh, you’re so lucky — you’re playing a girl; you’ll beat her easily.'" It was an early lesson in prejudice — and I thought to myself, I’m absolutely going to win this game." She did; and the defiance she showed then is the same attitude she brings to the corridors of power today. When I ask if she feels intimidated by the absence of a female predecessor in the job she hopes to hold, she shrugs. "Well, I’ve shadowed four chancellors so far…One had to resign because he didn’t declare his tax income properly; another crashed the economy. So no, I don’t have imposter syndrome."
She does, however, feel keenly that a lack of female role models can be a barrier to entry to both politics and economics, and that celebrating women’s historic and recent work is vital to encouraging more candidates to come forward. Hence the motivation behind her new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics — a follow-up to her 2019 volume Women of Westminster: the MPs Who Changed Politics — which aims to revive the reputations of great female economists whose legacy has been either forgotten or deliberately effaced. "I thought back to when I was studying economics, and I can only remember one textbook that was co-written by a woman," she says. "I don’t recall hearing about the theories of any women economists, and I found myself wondering, have they been written out of history or did they not exist at all?"
They did, of course, and Reeves’ book is a brilliantly researched tribute to a cohort that includes Harriet Martineau, a best-selling Victorian economist who helped popularise the now-widely known ideas of Adam Smith; Mary Paley Marshall, one of the first five women to attend the University of Cambridge and a major influence on John Maynard Keynes; and Joan Robinson, who, in 1933, made an economic case for a minimum wage, ahead of its introduction in the US in 1938. Many of their stories include elements that will sound all too familiar in the light of recent feminist research: Marshall’s husband Alfred, who was her close collaborator, took much of the credit for her work and edited out ideas that did not appeal to him — notably her progressive commentary on the gender pay gap—while Robinson missed out on the 1975 Nobel Prize for Economics that she had been almost universally expected to win.
Reeves traces a throughline between women who have gone before and some of today’s brightest talents, from the American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who did, thankfully, win a Nobel Prize in 2009 for her work on managing shared resources, to people in senior institutional roles outside the UK, such as the European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde and the US secretary of the treasury Janet Yellen. (On one of the bookshelves in her office, Reeves has a framed photograph of herself meeting Yellen, on whom she admits to having a ‘girl crush’.) While it is clear that a lack of senior women economists is a worldwide problem, they are particularly conspicuous for their absence in the UK, and Reeves feels that as a nation we are collectively failing to live up to our potential. "We’re still a great place to do business, but we’re letting some of that advantage slip away," she says, referring to failures such as our slow progress on investing in electric vehicles and other green technologies. "Britain has a strong industrial heritage, brilliant universities, a skilled workforce and plenty of entrepreneurs—there’s no reason why we can’t be a leader in the sector."
She dubs her own proposed strategy ‘securonomics’ and defines it as ‘building a secure and resilient national economy’ that is more resistant to shocks such as global conflicts or pandemics. "I want us to be less reliant on foreign countries, particularly those that don’t share our values, to support our basic needs," she explains. "Our plan is to invest in British industry so that there are more decent jobs paying good wages that, in turn, help rebuild family finances." It’s a long game she’s playing — especially given, as she puts it, "the terrible state of our public finances and all the chopping and changing of policy we’ve had" — but if anyone can win it, it has to be Reeves. "I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of chancellor and what I’d do with it," she says. "Now I’m ready to get started."
This piece originally appeared in the Dec 2023/Jan 2024 issue of Harper's Bazaar UK.
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