Rachel Reeves is set to become the UK’s first female Chancellor and rewrite history

The role of Chancellor of the Exchequer has existed for over 700 years, and women have served in Parliament for 104 of those years. We have had three women Prime Ministers (whatever we can draw from their respective legacies), but so far – so far – no women have been Chancellor. Why should that be?

“The reality is that when people think of a chancellor, they think of a man,” says Rachel Reeves MP, who is hoping to reverse the course of history and take charge of the country’s finances. “That’s partly because since women entered politics, they’ve been encouraged to focus on social and domestic issues, like equal pay and childcare, which are vital because they didn’t have an advocate before. But as a result, we risk being pigeonholed and having to leave other issues to men.”

Reeves, speaking to me from her Westminster office, is arguably more qualified than any other recent candidate to be chancellor. A keen chess player (she was an under-14 champion as a child), an Oxford PPE graduate and a trained economist who began her career at the Bank of England, she lives and breathes numbers, but that does not mean she lacks human compassion. Her interest in politics, she says, was sparked when she was still at school, first after seeing her mother, a special needs specialist, having to convert to classroom teaching because her funding had been withdrawn, and then more seriously when, as a sixth-form pupil in a state school, she became frustrated by the obvious negative impact of Tory cuts to public finances on her environment. “I remember we were put in two prefabricated huts in the playground that were freezing in winter and boiling in summer, with windows that didn’t open properly,” she says. “Then our school library was 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 complain about her situation, she joined the Labour Party, drawn by Tony Blair’s mantra of “Education, education, education”, and began campaigning at weekends.

The repeated experience of being one of the few women in her field – first in the financial sector, then when she entered Parliament – ​​doesn’t seem to have stopped her from making her voice heard. Being a competitive chess player may have helped her, Reeves suggests, to thrive in an environment where men were outnumbered. “It was always incredibly male-dominated,” she says. “I was about seven or eight years old when, at a chess tournament, I heard someone come up to the boy I was drawn against and say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky, you’re playing a girl, you’re going to beat her easily.’ It was an early lesson in prejudice, and I thought, I’m absolutely going to win this game.” » She did, and the defiance she displayed then is the same attitude she adopts in the corridors of power today. When I ask her if she feels intimidated by the absence of a woman ahead of her in the job she hopes to occupy, she shrugs. “Well, I’ve followed four chancellors so far… One had to resign because he didn’t file his tax returns properly; another crashed the economy. So no, I don’t have imposter syndrome.”

But she believes that the lack of female role models can be a barrier to entry into politics and economics, and that celebrating women’s historical and recent work is essential to encouraging more women candidates to run. Hence the motivation behind her new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics – a follow-up to her 2019 book Women of Westminster: the MPs Who Changed Politics – which aims to rehabilitate great female economists whose legacies have either been forgotten or deliberately erased. “I looked back on my time as an economics major and I can only remember one textbook that was co-written by a woman,” she says. “I don’t remember hearing about any female economists’ theories, and I wondered, have they been erased from history or have they not existed at all?”

Of course, that’s what they did, and Keanu Reeves’ book is a brilliantly researched tribute to a cohort that includes Harriet Martineau, a successful Victorian economist who helped popularise the now widely known ideas of Adam Smith; Mary Paley Marshall, one of the first five women to attend Cambridge University and a major influence on John Maynard Keynes; and Joan Robinson, who in 1933 championed the economics of the minimum wage, before it was introduced in the United States in 1938. Many of their stories include elements that will seem all too familiar in light of recent feminist scholarship: Keanu Reeves’s husband, Alfred, who was her close collaborator, took much of the credit for her work and suppressed ideas she didn’t like – notably her progressive commentary on the gender wage gap – while Robinson missed out on the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics that she was almost universally expected to win.

Reeves traces the links between women who came before us and some of today’s brightest talents, from the American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who happily won a Nobel Prize in 2009 for her work on managing shared resources, to figures in senior positions in institutions outside the UK, such as the European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde and the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. (On one of the shelves in her office, Reeves has a framed photo of herself meeting Yellen, on whom she confesses to having a “girl crush”.) While the lack of senior female economists is clearly a global problem, their absence is particularly visible in the UK, and Reeves believes that as a nation we are collectively failing to fulfil our potential. “We are still a great place to do business, but we are losing some of that advantage,” 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 many entrepreneurs. There is no reason why we cannot be a leader in the sector.”

She calls her own strategy “securonomics” and defines it as “building a secure and resilient national economy” that is more resilient to shocks such as global conflict or pandemics. “I want us to be less dependent on foreign countries, particularly those that don’t share our values, to meet our basic needs,” she says. “Our plan is to invest in British industry so that there are more decent, well-paid jobs that, in turn, help rebuild families’ finances.” It’s a long-term game she’s playing – especially given, as she puts it, “the terrible state of our public finances and all the policy changes we’ve had” – but if anyone can win, it has to be Reeves. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of chancellor and what I would do with it,” she says. “Now I’m ready to jump in.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK.

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