The new Ofcom boss, Sharon White, is forever being hailed as the first black woman appointed to senior roles in Whitehall, having blazed a trail through the white male upper ranks of the civil service over more than two decades.
An economist by training, White started off at the Treasury in the early 1990s, before returning in 2011 to lead a review of the financial crisis. She was promoted to the job of second permanent secretary last year.
White was reportedly admired by Ken Clarke during his time as chancellor, and current colleagues describe her as universally respected, always across her brief and a “thoroughly decent” manager. She is thought to have been recommended for the job to Sajid Javid, the culture secretary, with whom she worked when he was a junior Treasury minister.
White’s parents emigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s, and she grew up in Leyton, east London, where she went to a girls-only comprehensive school. She then studied at Cambridge University and University College London, and worked for a church in Birmingham, before joining the civil service in 1989.
After her initial stint at the Treasury, she spent time analysing US welfare reforms at the British embassy in Washington. Under the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair she worked again on welfare in the Downing Street policy unit, before taking on roles at the World Bank, the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Justice and Department for Work and Pensions.
On her return to the Treasury, her role as director of public spending meant she oversaw the government’s austerity policies and the fiscal squeeze that is expected to last throughout the next parliament. Her promotion to second permanent secretary put her in charge of the department’s finance ministry functions including tax, spending and fiscal issues.
She has given few interviews about her job but did speak to the Guardian in 2012 about what motivated her as a civil servant. She said: “When I was at university the questions I was most fascinated by were all connected to public economics – how should higher education be funded, what’s the optimal level of taxation and so on.
“I feel hugely privileged to have had a career in the public sector. You work on such big, important topics like building confidence in the criminal justice system or improving people’s employability – that affect the lives of millions of people, many of them vulnerable. I have worked in lots of different parts of the public sector and although the cultures have been quite different, everywhere there has been a strong, underpinning ethos of wanting to make a difference.”
She noted that the Treasury was perceived as having a “macho culture”, but argued that flexible working in the civil service had been an enormously positive development for women.
In a speech after being appointed as a Treasury director general, she quoted her only female predecessor on its management board, Rachel Lomax, as saying: “If you’re at the Treasury, you’re allowed one eccentricity, and if you are a woman, that’s basically it.”
White, who has two children, is also one half of an economic power couple – her husband is Robert Chote, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility.
