The quiet, matter-of-fact takeover of women holding senior economist roles | Heather Stewart

Rachel Reeves is rightly proud of being the first female chancellor of the exchequer, but she is far from alone: the commanding heights of economic policymaking in the UK are becoming much less male.

At a Westminster thinktank event last week about whether Labour is still a “mission-led government”, one of the most striking things was not the panel’s answer, which you can probably guess, but the fact that it was made up of three women, and one token man.

The Institute for Government’s director, Hannah White, was joined by its chief economist, Gemma Tetlow, and the no-nonsense new director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Helen Miller – as well as Stephen Bush of the Financial Times.

Elsewhere, the Resolution Foundation is now run by Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury economist….