Vickynomics... leading economist Vicky Pryce on why more women should be in top finance jobs

The leading economist and former wife of Chris Huhne tells Rosamund Urwin why more women in top finance jobs could help cure the toxic culture of the City
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9 July 2012

When Vicky Pryce was in her mid-twenties, she was promoted to run the economics office at a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland. Back then, even the statisticians and economists she managed had pictures of Page 3 girls splashed all over the screens dividing their desks. Pryce’s first demand was that they take them down.

“Until then I hadn’t dared,” she recalls. “But the men had no problem with removing them whatsoever.” So it was just bravado? “Yes, perhaps it was to show how manly they are.”

She believes this casual sexism still pervades parts of the City: “Taking clients off to lap-dancing clubs in the evening is pretty common — what can a woman do?”

The Greece-born 59-year-old boasts a dream City CV. After spells at KPMG and Exxon Europe, she became the first female chief economist at the Department of Trade and Industry and is now a senior managing director at a consultancy firm.

Until two years ago, she also played the invisible political wife to the Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne. Now she has become the very visible ex-wife, ending up in court with Huhne amid allegations he wrongly told investigators Pryce was driving a car alleged to have broken the speed limit. Any discussion of the case is, of course, off limits: the pair have their pre-trial hearing at the end of the month.

We are sitting in her study — a basement room lined with books and packed with papers — in her tall house with high ceilings close to Clapham Common. It is where she is finishing her first book, Greekonomics, in which she explores the economic disaster that has hit her homeland.

A few hours before we meet, Bob Diamond resigned as chief executive of Barclays. As the scandal engulfed the bank — the latest in a long list of unethical practices to have been exposed in the City — Pryce was one of the senior figures calling for reform of the banking industry, even appearing on Woman’s Hour to criticise finance’s macho culture.

Both Harriet Harman and Christine Lagarde have mused that, had there been more women in top roles at banks, the world economy wouldn’t be in such a mess.

Pryce reckons women are “slightly better” at “collegiate behaviour and caring for the common good”. But it is in the most risky, “casino” parts of banking — where testosterone dominates — that she thinks feminising the workforce would have the most marked effect.

“Studies about these traders find that — partly because of the hormones — they don’t actually think they are taking risks, they’re just optimistic. They think they’ll beat the market... and they think, ‘I’d better deal with someone else who also thinks this is a fantastic idea, rather than [someone] who thinks it’s really risky’.”

She points to the cases of rogue traders such as Jerome Kerviel and Nick Leeson, and argues that women tend to be more realistic. But the problem is that this makes them less popular in dealing rooms: “If you’re more calculated and so do not share their optimism, you are perceived not to be a team player and they don’t want to deal with you, because you don’t want to do the trades they want to.”

So are the women who prosper those who behave most like men? “Yes, and you end up with very few of them — the others just leave or are ostracised or are made victims. Only if the culture changes, if the rewards are not linked to excessive risk-taking, are traders not going to do it.”

A way to change the culture, Pryce says, is to have more female executives. “But the worst thing you can do as a woman is be like a man.”

She’s no fan of those women who — to put it crudely — try to prove they’ve got the biggest balls in the building. “It may be good for them, and they may earn lots of money and be one of the few chairwomen of a bank or whatever, but it certainly doesn’t endear them to other women who want to come up. If you want more women in the organisation, you don’t do it by being more like a man, because you put them off.”

So should women in business help one another? “Oh, hugely. I belong to every woman’s network that exists.” Why? “We all know the classic thing — we don’t go to the loo, stand next to each other and talk about the next deal. Golf bores most women to tears, so we don’t do that. Men help each other, so why shouldn’t women?”

With respect to the boardroom, Pryce backs the introduction of quotas, including for executives — although she suggests the demands should vary according to sector. “Companies should be accountable, because if you want the culture to change, this is the only way it will happen. You don’t want just to have a handful of women who are just like men.”

What frustrates her about the lack of women in top roles is the huge loss of talent it represents: “Women are just as bright as men, if not brighter... We invest heavily in them and then let them disappear — either because of the culture of a bank or because once they have kids they are no longer taken seriously or because they don’t want to go to lap-dancing clubs at night ordering glasses of champagne.”

When women feel pushed out, it hurts wider society: “They go and do other things — sometimes part-time, sometimes things that don’t use their brains particularly and what you end up with is women generally working below their skills level... That won’t allow the economy to grow at its full potential.”

But what about the issue of childcare? Pryce is a mother of five: she has two daughters from her first marriage to a London School of Economics academic, and two sons and a daughter from her marriage to Huhne.

Living up to the City superwoman cliche, Pryce took very little maternity leave: “a few weeks” for her first four children and just three days for her last: “I had this perception that it is pretty bad if I’m pregnant and go off, so I was constantly there even when I was enormous, until the last day and then I came back quite quickly.”

The reason for the rush back to the office after the birth of her last child was that her firm KPMG had just won a big contract: “I had been very involved in putting it all together, and the presentation was on the day I gave birth and the team promised that the entire team would be there if we got the job on the Friday. So I got up and went, and it was brilliant because it meant I actually recovered much faster than I did with the other kids.”

Because she had to? “Yes. I remember being upstairs in the bedroom with the baby there and thinking, ‘How on earth am I going to get up and go to work?’ and ‘Would I fit into anything?’ But the moment I got into my cab, I was back in work mode ... A lot of the recovery is about how the brain works, it’s psychological in a way, although there are obviously hormones and everything else. But for the next few hours, I thought of nothing but work.”

Though she is past the point of needing childcare now (her youngest child is 19, her eldest 36) she had a live-in au pair while her children were growing up.

Later, when she worked at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, there was a nursery on site, something she thinks employers should offer — when possible — to retain staff. She says employers are increasingly waking up to the need to be more flexible too: “A number of my accountancy partners at KPMG had arrangements that they would take four-fifths of the profits and take the whole of Christmas off, the summer off to be with the children.”

Pryce suggests having more female bosses will help improve the attitude businesses take towards childcare.

As the interview wraps up, her thoughts return to the issue of female representation at the top in business: “Just 6.5 per cent of FTSE 100 company executive directors are women. That’s really what we should focus on.”

Pryce is right — Vicky’s plan to save the city

Banks should still award bonuses but have the ability to vary them. They should be dependent on a wider range of criteria being met, such as how the bank is doing and whether trades are transparent and understood by the board.

Bankers should be rewarded according to long-term performance — if you remunerate them in terms of short-term performance then even if their book is better than anyone else’s, it could all unwind the following year, and you’ve remunerated them for something that isn’t actually permanent, and you can’t take it back.

Forget separating investment and retail banking as a cure for the problems in the banking sector, and concentrate instead on cultural change. A lot of foreign exchange dealing which is done for clients is done by the retail side.

Reduce shareholder pressure on chief executives to have high returns at a time when interest rates are low and inflation is low. That is putting huge pressure on banks to take more risks or to go into products that perhaps we don’t understand.

Tackle the laddish culture to attract more women to the industry. If banks had a better pool of people to draw from, they should do better.

Women financiers should challenge the macho atmosphere — the worst thing you can do as a woman is be like a man.

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