Banknote trivia ...

Although it was a silly mistake on the part of the Bank of England[1] to phase out the Elizabeth Fry notes before bringing the Jane Austen ones in, and having an all-male series of notes isn't on, I think that the people behind this campaign are being a little bit precious in getting offended at the fact that a lot of people on Twitter (including me, although I'm not listed there) made an amazingly obvious joke. It's presumably quite tedious to get the same amazingly obvious and weak joke repeated to you dozens of times but ... well, Twitter innit?

 Actually, there is a decent case to be made that HM the Queen is on the banknotes for her own achievements rather than simply because of an accident of birth. She was born into the monarchy, but it is not the case that being monarch automatically gets you onto the banknotes. In fact, HM Queen Elizabeth II is the only British monarch ever to have been honoured with a portrait on Bank of England notes.

Notes aren't printed by the Royal Mint - they're handled completely separately from coins. For most of its existence, the Bank of England did not want its own unassailable credit to be associated with the often decidedly ropey finances of the royal house. After nationalisation in 1945, and the post war constitutional settlement, the relationship between Bank and State and that between Queen and State changed pretty fundamentally , and in 1960, they produced the first series of notes with the royal portrait on them. So I would say that QEII is on the banknotes at least partly because she's the first British monarch to have developed a fully modern relationship with her government, of the sort that they have in countries which put their heads of state on the notes much earlier.

[1] Not sure how it happened really; unlikely to be institutional sexism as the BoE's head of banknotes, Victoria Cleland (as well as being a really nice person as I remember) is pretty active in "Women in the City" type groups.