Fraser of Allander economist Mairi Spowage bucking the trend in the industry

Now, as she prepares to become the first woman to head Scotland’s most respected economic think tank, she’s working to change the way her sector adds up.

A former deputy chief executive of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which she helped set up, Spowage will become interim director of the Fraser of Allander Institute in the spring as current head professor Graeme Roy moves on.

The Strathclyde University unit counts everyone from the Northern Ireland Executive to Celtic FC as a client and produces regular commentary on Scotland’s public finances.

But in its 45-year history, it’s never had a woman in the top job before.

“It maybe shouldn’t have taken this long,” Spowage says. “It shouldn’t be such a big thing, but after 45 years they finally appointed a woman.

“That sends good signals. It does help, given the sort of image of the profession sometimes can be old, dusty, white guys.”

Currently the deputy director of the body, Spowage took that role after a significant term with the civil service which also saw her serve as head of accounts at the Scottish Government.

It’s an impressive CV and one that bucks trends in a specialism in which people of Spowage’s profile are a rarity. There is, she says, an obvious “diversity issue” that has a knock-on effect for the development of public policy. “It’s not just about gender, there’s a big issue of socioeconomic background,” she says. “State schools don’t tend to offer economics as a subject – the private schools do. It does skew the demographic from the off. People who float through are likely to be of a more affluent socio-economic background.

“If you don’t have diversity in the profession, you don’t have a diversity of thought so the issues that are researched or thought about are also not very diverse. It’s really important.”

Educated at Clackmannanshire comprehensive Alva Academy, the 38-year-old enrolled at St Andrews University in Fife in 2000. “I went the year before Prince William came and it was actually not that posh then, but it got really posh in my second year,” she says. “There weren’t an awful lot of people from my background there. It was quite eye-opening.”

Spowage joined the civil service through a fast-track programme in 2005 under the then Labour-LibDem coalition government at Holyrood. When the SNP administration came in two years later, there were “a lot of changes in terms of the way we worked with ministers, and everything else”.

She returned from her third period of maternity leave in 2013, with her husband looking after the children. The move sparked questions from men and women at work. “It’s not uncommon for women in the civil service to go to part-time hours, which I wouldn’t criticise, but given the job I had, I felt I couldn’t do that part-time.

“And I was the main breadwinner, I had to come back full-time. You would get some people being quite surprised that you were back, almost like it’s not right to have ambition when you have three kids under four. It was like, ‘my husband is at home with the kids, is that not alright?’”

HER return to work came as the progress towards the independence referendum picked up – something she says was “a baptism of fire”.

But that pace of change can’t compare with the pandemic, she says. “Nothing has been like the situation of the last nine, 10 months with policy changing at lightning speed, made and remade. I’ve never seen anything like it. The light it’s shone on the way the money system works and in terms of the funding of devolved government is a really interesting issue.

“If I have to write something for a presentation or a foreword for a paper, it has to be done the morning before or it will be out of date. It’s that kind of time.”

With the economy in flux and significant changes to the way we operate thanks to the enforced rise in home working, Spowage and her team are looking not only at issues like the outlook for the high street and hospitality, but also for productivity and the make-up of the workforce.

She wonders how much of the change to our working lives will “stick”, how many of us will continue logging in from home after restrictions lift and what that means for the sandwich shops and convenience stores that populate our high streets.

When she’s been back at her Glasgow city centre campus, she’s been struck by how quiet the nearby outlets are, the ones that normally cater to throngs of students and staff now eating out of their kitchens instead. “They’re normally heaving,” she says. “That’s the sort of shops that probably won’t survive.”

Job figures released earlier this week showed a slight drop in unemployment in Scotland between August and October, but Spowage is cautious about the immediate future, particularly with so many Brexit details still unknown. In its most recent paper, Fraser of Allander suggests a slow rollout of the coronavirus vaccine could mean economic growth in Scotland won’t return to pre-pandemic levels for almost three years.

“Forecasting is a very difficult business,” she says. “There’s the old adage that they’re all wrong, but some of them are useful. It’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen.

“We are now in an era of lower productivity growth and lower economic growth. Future unemployment is completely masked. The reports are not capturing the fall in hours, vacancies, the rise in redundancies.

“Christmas will start to give us a feel for how cautious the consumer has been and there was pent-up demand in housing market released August, but that seems to have gone off the boil.

“People are just absolutely hungry for data, which means we’ve been absolutely inundated with requests for help and we’re happy to help organisations understand the impact of Covid on their area.

“But we don’t have any special crystal ball. We know if this happens, it might mean this or that, but it’s not an easy business.”

One solution to handling the uncertainty, she says, is ensuring the population has a grasp of public policy and the issues that underpin it.

While the level of political engagement may have increased since 2014, Spowage is less certain that there’s a real understanding of the economics of the arguments and the drivers of decision-making by elected leaders. “With income tax devolution, for example, how many people understand that?” she asks. “How many people know it’s devolved? How many know that they will pay probably more tax here than the sort of rates in England? How many people get that or care about it or get upset about it, or not? I’m not sure.

“The population, whether they engage with it or not, should know. They should know what powers the Scottish Parliament actually has and what, therefore, they can hold it accountable for. It’s important people know how to read a manifesto, how to believe the claims made and hold the parties to account.

“It might mean we have a long way to go.”

To that end, Fraser of Allander is working to produce a greater spread of accessible materials, like podcasts and explainers, to reach more people.

MEANWHILE, it’s also trying to knock down obstacles to a career in economics for learners from a range of backgrounds through its Economic Futures programme, which is supported by Scottish Funding Council and encourages modern studies and maths pupils to consider taking it up after leaving school.

“It’s what can help us think about the different policy challenges we face,” she says. "Organisations are crying out for people with good analytical skills.

“We train a lot of economists in Scotland, but I don’t know where they all go. A lot of them end up in businesses in London or something.

“Anything we can do to make it more accessible for people, we will do.”