Why not a female Governor of the Bank of England?

Economic policy is the last great bastion of public life to be still held almost exclusively by men. The premiership, education and even defence have all fallen to women – although still too few of them. But looking at governments on both sides of the Atlantic, of women finance ministers or central bankers there has barely been a sighting.

Why this is so is something of a puzzle. It could, of course, be that bankers are looked on rather as hospital consultants once were. You only trust them if they're wearing a waistcoat and a fob watch. But given the number of bank manageresses, I find this a difficult argument to sustain. Women have long since climbed to the top of fund management firms, and there are female finance directors now in a number of companies from Condé Nast Publications to Pearsons. There may not be enough of them. But no one can still suggest that women and economics don't mix.

No, the real reason I think that men still monopolise this area is that they know it to be the last and most important area of patronage and power left to them. Men like all the business of secrecy and dealing that goes with economics departments, they relish the business of teasing markets that goes with being the head of a central bank or an economic ministry.

You only have to look at the pronouncements of the next Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in the run-up to yesterday's decision to hold interest rates. Or the fog of words that still surrounds the question of whether we are, or are not, going to seek an early referendum on joining the euro.

I defy anyone to read Mervyn King's evidence to the Commons Treasury Select Committee, or the various statements and interviews by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister over the last 10 days, and come out with any idea of what was happening to the economy, let alone what Gordon Brown has called "perhaps the biggest peacetime economic decision we as a nation have to make".

Take this comment – the central comment– of Mervyn King to the Commons Select Committee. "The immediate question is whether changes in asset prices have led to an imbalance within the economy that poses the risk of a large negative demand shock at some point in the future. I believe the answer is 'yes'." I understand the answer. But the question?

And it only gets worse when you get into the Kremlinology of whether Gordon Brown's pre-Budget spending speech, or the accompanying Treasury documents, or the appointment of Mervyn King, presages a postponement of a euro referendum or not.

Some of this obscurity, of course, may stem from the curious language that economists use, and for which Mervyn King, the first academic economist to head the Bank of England, is famous. Governors and Chancellors have to be careful of saying anything that might move the markets.

But a lot of this obfuscation is deliberate and unnecessarily masculine. Central bankers like the power of knowing things which they can keep from the public. Just watch the present Governor, Eddie George, in action. I don't believe that women enjoy that game. Still less do they take to the kind of territorial scrapping, sulks and arm-wrestling that the Prime Minister and his Chancellor are going in for at the moment. There are real issues of the euro as there are over university top-up fees. But an awful lot is just macho rivalry.

I am not so naive as to believe that having a woman Chancellor or Governor of the Bank of England will produce an entirely different politics. We have Mo Mowlam and Clare Short to show that role playing and posturing is as much a feminine vice as a masculine one. And we have Barbara Roche and Yvette Cooper to prove that placewomen are no different to placemen in this government. When it concerns the issue where you might think (or hope) that gender might make a difference – that of war – the recent votes have shown that, should it come to it, the women will be trooping with the men through the government lobbies.

But I still think by nurture as much as nature, women are more naturally inclined to try and communicate their thoughts clearly, and that we need that in economics more than any other issue.

Talking to my economist friends, what the Government seems to be saying is this. On all the normal laws of projection, the prospects of inflation and the house-price boom should warrant a rise rather than a fall in interest rates. But then this slowdown in economic activity is likely to get worse before it gets better. So best to leave as is.

For the same reasons, the economic case for joining the euro in the short term is thin. Sterling is at far too high a rate, and nothing that is likely to be done to help recovery in Europe – reducing interest rates or loosening the terms of the stability pact – will ease the disparity between euro and sterling levels. Nor will it do anything to produce the kind of economic convergence necessary for Britain to don the euro corset.

If that is what the Government is saying, it seems clear enough to me. Clear enough, at any rate, to promote the kind of open debate that is needed before the famous "five economic tests" are used next June to confuse the matter still further. But then clarity is not, I suspect, the name of the game these boys are playing at the moment.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk