Dame Helen Ghosh: A resilient and adaptable leader who tried to show other women that senior roles could be enjoyable

Dame Helen Ghosh has a theory that her female-dominated start in life may have helped her to climb the ranks of the civil service.

“I went to a single sex school,” she says. “I saw women being in charge. It was a convent, so there were female nuns in charge.” She then went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford – which was single-sex at the time – where she read modern history.

 “I wasn't brought up from a child in a situation where being female was a disadvantage, where thinking about your gender, or sex rather, really mattered,” she says. “It never occurred to me to think, ‘Oh, I’m a woman, I wonder how I’ll get on here’.”

She once compared notes with a small group of female permanent secretaries on a panel for International Women’s Day. “And it turned out that two of the other three female permanent secretaries there had had exactly the same experience, and therefore said that they felt the same. It never occurred to them to think that it would be a disadvantage to be a woman.”

Nowadays she suspects this outlook might be less common, “just because of the greater diversity of education and experience among people who get, I'm happy to say, to the top of the civil service. But I think this issue of your young experience is very formative”.

Ghosh remembers there being plenty of women in senior positions as she joined the civil service as an administration trainee in 1979. The Department for the Environment, where she started, was “one of the mega-departments that was set up in the ‘70s”, covering housing, planning, sport, environment, rural affairs, and urban regeneration.

“There was a whole tranche of women under-secretaries, as they were called then.” She says. “Some of them had joined in the immediately post-war era. So although probably, statistically, we were nothing like 50:50, there were enough role models to think that the gender balance was reasonable.”

“It never occurred to me to think, ‘Oh, I’m a woman, I wonder how I’ll get on here’”

Ghosh never seriously considered any career beside the civil service. “I came from a public sector background,” she says. “My dad was a scientific civil servant in Farnborough. My mum had five children, and then did an Open University degree and was a librarian.” She wanted a job that was intellectually challenging, “where I felt I was doing something for the public good, because that was the background I came from.”

The civil service had “lots of kudos, and I never really thought of anything else”, she says, other than wondering briefly about becoming a barrister. “But in those days, it was a very expensive thing to be, and my family were just the public sector middle classes, and so I didn’t pursue that one,” she says.

From 1981 to 1983 she was assistant private secretary to Michael Heseltine, who she describes as “very good to work for”, in part because he’d had experience of the private sector: “He’d set up his own company, ran his own company himself, and that meant he understood that going from ‘here's the idea, to now put it into action’, there are things you need to do in between.”

“He had hinterland,” she adds. “And he worked with civil servants as though they were a team.”

She recalls that during her period working for Heseltine from 1981-83, she would sit in the civil service box in the House of Commons, and would see people with a range of backgrounds: “You looked around and you saw miners and lecturers and union officials and barristers. You saw people who had done something else, who understood the world, and the difficulties of doing things.”

Her later choice of roles was led by her preference for departments where there was real contact with the public, like DWP where “you had lots of people who were really practical and knew how to run a local job centre; I really liked departments like that”.

She made a decision, when her period on loan to the Cabinet Office ended in 1997, which she believes to have been pivotal in her career. She had the opportunity to return to local government finance, which would have been safer ground. “I said, ‘No, I don't want to do any more central policy. I want to do something more practical and outward-looking,’” she says.

So instead she went to the Government Office for London, where she was the director for regeneration for East London. “Having been the bright policy wonk for 16 years, I was suddenly… in Newham. I was talking to local authority leaders about local regeneration. I was talking to local tenants’ groups and single mums at the top of tower blocks. That was absolutely wonderful for me. It was fascinating. It was fresh air.”

Her advice to officials who want to progress their careers is rooted in this key decision: “Take a chance. Don't go back – take a chance on things you haven't done before.”

“Never forget that they're watching you. How you appear even when you’re just coming out of a room. You should always be conscious of what people will read into it”

Ghosh insists that in the departments she worked in, she did not feel she was operating in an environment dominated by men. The only exception she recalls was at one of the regular Wednesday morning permanent secretaries’ meetings: “Somebody had said something that deserved congratulations, and everybody started banging on the table. That's how they expressed congratulations,” she says. “Whereas it's not something a woman ever does. We wouldn’t think of doing that.” It was one of those cultural signals, she says, which made her think: “Oh, this is a male world after all.”

She also takes exception to some of the gendered language that was used as she became more senior: “Particularly when you're sitting on a selection panel, you know: ‘Do they have gravitas?’ That one really bugs me. Actually, they mean they want someone who's like a man. It crops up in other worlds that I've worked in since.”

In 2005, Ghosh was made permanent secretary at Defra. She recalls agreeing with Sue Street – who was then perm sec at DCMS – that female permanent secretaries had a responsibility to look happy.

“Never forget that they're watching you,” she says, of this pact with Street. “When you are in any way a visible leader, your expression, even how you appear when you’re just coming out of a room. You should always be conscious of what people will read into it.”

She says this idea was supported  by some research carried out by the Cabinet Office, which looked into why women did not always put themselves forward for the most senior roles. “One of the findings was that women place a higher value than men on doing a job that makes them happy,  They need to know that they will enjoy themselves.  So role models have to look as though it's a thing worth doing – there is  a person, a woman, who looks as though they're enjoying what they do, or thinks it's worth going through the tough times for what they do.”

She also believes it’s a mistake to pretend that it’s easy or that you can “have it all”. She is aware that people might think: “‘Oh, look at you, you've got children, and you've got to the top of the civil service, and you seem to manage to do both.’”

She is clear in her message to other women on this: “You cannot have it all,” she says. “You do give up time with your family, you do give up hours of sleep, you do give up some element of personal privacy. Nobody – man or woman – gets to the top of any organisation without giving something up. And it's foolish to think that you will. But the important thing is to know what it is you want.”

“I think being the first female cabinet secretary would be a wonderful feather in your cap. You'd look at the headlines and think, ‘isn’t that great?’ But would I really have enjoyed doing the job?”

Ghosh recalls her own decision to start a family being shaped by a rule that prevented officials from applying to the senior civil service before the age of 32. She was getting recommendations for promotion at the age of 30, and remembers speaking to an HR officer, who said: “You're just going to have to hang around.”

She decided, “Well, I’ll have my children then,” thinking that she would apply for SCS positions once she came back from maternity leave. But then an unexpected offer threw a spanner in the works.

“I discovered that I was expecting our daughter, just at the moment when Number 10 was writing around to permanent secretaries, saying: ‘Have you got anybody to nominate to come and be a private secretary in Number 10?’” she says. “And I was called into the permanent secretary's office, and he said, I've just had this letter from whoever was principal private secretary at Number 10 then. And they said, ‘We thought we might nominate you.’”

She asked if she could think about it: “And you know, then, and even now, I think that would have been a great experience.” But she knew her pregnancy would mean it was not possible for her to take the job. “I had to go back in the end and say, ‘I'm expecting a baby, so please, you can't consider me.’”

She admits there were moments in the middle of the night, when she was up multiple times feeding the baby, when she thought: “Have I just destroyed my career?”

Commuting from Oxford made her days longer, and she didn’t have many visible role models. “I didn't see many people who had done it. And people who had done it didn't talk about it much, or they had a house husband. Or their situation was different from mine. I think I did have some low moments of thinking, “Have I really got the energy to do this?”

How did she manage to do it?

“I think three things made it possible,” she says. “My children were basically healthy, and I hope happy. My partner completely supported the project. I remember mentoring some young female civil servants, and you could just tell that their other half wasn't quite in the same place that they were. And I think that is very important. And thirdly I put an awful lot of effort and time, and money actually, into making sure I had good, reliable childcare. If any of those three things hadn't been true, I don’t think it would have worked.”

She feels it’s one of her responsibilities to show other women that “if you really want this, and you're well organised and you have good support at home, you can do this”.

It’s well-documented that Ghosh was being considered as a successor to Gus O’Donnell when she was perm sec at the Home Office from 2010-2012. She confirms that she had been encouraged to apply for the head of civil service role, and that she was tempted, up to a point: “I think being the first female cabinet secretary would be a wonderful feather in your cap. You'd look at the headlines and think,  ‘isn’t that great?’ But would I really have enjoyed doing the job?”

She does think she would have found the leadership aspects of the role rewarding, but also that “it’s an incredibly difficult job… The cut and thrust and the micro-climate there is in the Cabinet Office, I would not have enjoyed”.

"The moment politicians think we'll run off to the papers the moment we retire – it just destroys trust. So it's not good for the institution which I love.”

She has never regretted her decision to join the civil service. “All the reasons I joined were amply fulfilled,” she says. She thinks resilience and emotional intelligence proved to be just as important as intellect, the more senior she got. “It can be very emotionally draining,” she says, referring to the challenge of advising politicians and understanding their motivations.

Is it true that, on leaving the civil service to take up the top job at the National Trust in 2012, she said that she “could not wait” to be openly critical of government?

“No, no, no. That's misinformation,” she says, explaining that it possibly stems from an interview given by a National Trust board member at the time of her appointment.

The truth is, she is “religious” about never passing comment on the workings of government, other than “general views, which I express about good policy making, and what civil service reform might look like”. She is regularly approached by the BBC, she says. “And I make an absolute point of never doing it, because I don't think it's appropriate. I also think it lets down your successors. Because the moment politicians think, in fact, we'll run off to the papers the moment we retire – it just destroys trust. So it's not good for the institution which I love.”