It drives me nuts' Top Bank executive on the problem of economics teaching

Economics has an image problem, says Clare Lombardelli, a deputy governor at the Bank of England. With few children from poorer backgrounds studying the subject and only a small number of women pursuing it to undergraduate level, the profession is heavily weighted in favour of well-to-do men.

- Phillip Inman

"It's pretty bad in all sorts of ways," Lombardelli says. "It drives me nuts when you talk to people about economics, and they think about textbooks and equations and men in grey suits talking about the stock market when the economy is way more interesting than that.

"It's about millions of people making decisions all the time. Do they go to Starbucks or Greggs? What is driving the economies of other countries, and what are the constraints on green transition? There are tons of, literally, the most interesting questions."

Lombardelli is a former senior Treasury official who has come to Threadneedle Street via the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Now she is on a mission to tackle what has long been seen as a democratic deficit in the UK - a lack of understanding in the population at large about how the economy actually works.

She also wants women to have the chance to study economics at their local state school, to alter a gender imbalance stuck for more than a decade at seven to three in favour of male pupils.

"There is a problem with the amount of economics taught, and the distribution," she says. "It is concentrated in private schools, it is not taught around the country, women don't tend to study it, and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds don't either."