Economics affects everyone and people need to know more about it, says 18-year-old Emily Lee-Williams, who is studying the subject at St Marylebone, an inner-London state school. “But it seems quite intimidating in the media . . . If you think of an economist, you think of a rich man in a business suit who is so much higher up than you are.”
Many in the profession are worried that too few women work in economics at senior level. But only recently has the source of much of the problem been identified: women are far less likely than men to study economics, let alone pursue a career in it.
Just over a third of undergraduate economics students in the UK are women (overall, 57 per cent of undergraduates are women). The picture is similar in Australia and the US.