ROYAL Bank of Scotland has been in the public eye for all the wrong reasons in recent years, with everything from a government bailout to the decidedly dodgy behaviour of its business restructuring unit doing nothing to enhance its image.

The bank is painfully aware of this, of course, to the extent that it has even floated the idea of ditching the RBS moniker in favour of something less “tarnished”. While some within the organisation obviously believe that such a big gesture is necessary for RBS’s ongoing rehabilitation, other steps the bank is taking are likely to help it get there in less grandiose fashion.

Indeed, you only have to take a look at the notes the bank has issued in the years since its near-collapse, all of which feature the image of a woman, to get an idea of the kind of organisation RBS would like to become. After putting writer Nan Shepherd on its £5 polymer note in 2016, the bank used an image of astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville for the £10 version it released a year later and has now followed that up by putting entrepreneur Kate Cranston of Willow Tearooms fame on its new-issue £20 note.

After nearly 300 years in which only men - and well-connected men at that - were thought worthy of such an honour, you may think it is about time that women were given their turn. Coming as it does from an institution that just 10 years ago epitomised all that was wrong with the testosterone-fuelled macho world of business, though, this is about so much more than simply giving women a shot. It is about showing that RBS has changed into an entity that is not only self-aware but, crucially, is aware of the world it inhabits too.

For too long the notes printed and distributed by banks have given the impression that that world is one where only men matter, or at least where only men’s achievements are worth taking note of. As journalist and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez said when challenging the Bank of England’s 2013 decision to replace prison reformer Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on its £5 notes: “An all-male line-up on our banknotes sends out the damaging message that no woman has done anything important enough to appear.”

Our towns and cities are full of images and symbols of what countless men have achieved, with the naming of streets and chiselling of statues conferring Men of History status on them in the process. Women have not been afforded this luxury and, with some exceptions that remain woefully few and far between, their many achievements have gone unnoticed. This was highlighted by Willow Tea Room Trust chair Celia Sinclair when she said at the launch of the new RBS £20 note that while Kate Cranston was an “excellent businesswoman who changed attitudes”, in her day she really wasn’t all that unusual. “There were many women like Kate Cranston around at that time, but history simply doesn’t remember them,” Ms Sinclair noted.

That society has been able to forget those and countless other women is damaging because while it risks giving women the impression that they have nothing to live up to, it also perpetuates the myth still believed by some men that they simply haven’t achieved anything worth commemorating in the first place. All little girls need positive role models to give them the belief that they can grow up to be whatever they want to be, but it is just as important for equality that little boys know that women fulfil important roles too. I hadn’t realised quite how important until the day my then three-year-old son, who up until that point had only ever been seen by a female GP, couldn’t get his head round the fact the doctor we were off to see was going to be a man. Seeing is believing, though, and after that visit he took me at my word when I said that, just like women, men too can be anything they want to be.

Which is why it is so important that Nan Shepherd, Mary Somerville and Kate Cranston, whose histories show what women can achieve in the arts, science and business worlds, have not just been commemorated but have been commemorated in a way that ensures all of us will come into contact with their images again and again and again. As RBS’s Scottish chair Malcolm Buchanan said when he unveiled the Kate Cranston £20 last week, the bank feels that “a banknote’s value is more than just the figure printed across its front - it is our symbol, which lives in people’s pockets and touches everyday lives”.

A statue in a part of a town that a fraction of us will visit or a portrait on a wall that only some of us will pass by is one thing, but an image on a note that will fall out of birthday cards and get passed from person to person as we go about our daily lives has the potential to have a far greater impact on our collective consciousness.

RBS’s inclusion of women on its notes may have come at a time when banks in general are making plans for a cashless society, but there are still tens of millions of them in circulation and it is no exaggeration to say that in an incremental way the move will help to make society better for all of us.