AIBU for parents to know what roughly what job I do?

[myjob]

I probably am being unreasonable, but hear me out. Just having a brat really.

I work in the city of London in a finance role, supporting fund managers. My mum has asked what I do and I have told her many times what my role is and how it supports the wider business. She just doesn't understand it and when I try to explain, she says "it's all so complicated!" And won't even try to listen. She is in her 60's and was a SAHM her whole life. My brother works in digital media sales and it's the same with him. She thinks he works with computers and I'm a secretary. She doesn't seem to understand that I'm not in a typing pool.

It's a stressful, serious job. I have tried to explain, she doesn't seem to understand that women can have important roles in an office environment.

Do your parents understand your job if it's not something like teacher or nurse? Maybe IABU! I give up with trying to explain it now!

In conversations like this, I do begin to wonder if I’ve just got a really low IQ. Your explanation of your husband’s job makes sense. I still don’t understand what you do though! I think I am rather fuzzy on what a computer system actually is. I know what computers are of course, but is a system referring to the physical hardware of the computer? Or the software? Or both? Or are we talking about more than one computer working together in a system?
I don’t think my brain works like other people’s. 😐

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves I really don't believe that there are that many jobs where the basic idea of what they entail is truly incomprehensible to a person of average intelligence, so there must be something else going on here

I’ll bite. My DH does explain it, and it’s probably comprehensible but I find after the first sentence I just watch his mouth move basically and my mind wanders somewhat. Words like network are often thrown out there so I will say ‘you work with networks’ and he’ll say ‘well, not per se, as I said, I blah blah’, and again I just find myself watching his mouth move. Same with one of my kids who explains their role in finance.

No, I'd never worked there. I'd been occasionally for a conference but she definitely didn't know that! I did however, work overseas. But it's the equivalent of saying oh yes, Alpinia is teaching primary kids English in Brazil when I was actually the ambassador to Japan. Think she just thought teaching was a suitable and likely career for a 'smart' woman and she knew I was overseas so obviously English was what I was teaching. Oh well, saved the difficulty of actually explaining what I did do!

My husband works in finance. His job is to keep track of all the spending across his area of the business and see how it compares to the budgeted costs

See, that I understand instantly as this has always been a finance role I’m familiar with in my workplaces, even though I’m not in finance myself.

Your IT example. The have no idea what you do with systems and users, something to do with computers is my interpretation.

This reminds me of when I did my dad's probate. I am not a lawyer but I understand how to follow a process and the gov.uk systems. I had read through all the guidelines on probate to understand that a solicitor wasn't needed in this case.

But my mum told me that her Bank Manager had said I wasn't allowed to do it and we need to pay (£££) to a solicitor and she refused to believe me (her daughter who has held senior management positions and is a company director). When I queried who the big dick swinging Bank Manager was - it turned out it was a bloke at the Halifax call centre.

(I did the probate and it was fine. I also did her LPAs too.)

My husband is a graphic designer but most of his work is websites these days. I understand the basic premise: that he liaises with clients and finds out what they want their website to look like and how they want it to work (functionality?) and then he draws some nice pictures to show what it’ll look like. And then he and his business partner build it. My husband does the ‘front end’ and his pal does the ‘back end’ 😂 Any explanation that goes further than this is usually beyond me.

OK. So you're not really that interested and they're quite bad at explaining without a load of jargon? Fair enough. Thank you for answering.

Personally, I'd be quite hurt if my DH and/or my parents were so uninterested in what I do, because the work really matters to me and I put a lot into it, but maybe some people don't really care either way. I guess if you are one of those people who just sees work as a means to an end, it might not really matter.

My parents understood (both deceased now) what I do for a living; they paid a lot of money to educate me to do it and were happy they were getting their money's worth.

I think quite a few jobs are very niche these days and "siloed" so it's not as easy to grasp exactly what people are up to, especially if they never leave their house to do their jobs. I'm not quite sure what one of my children does to be honest, something to do with marketing and algorithms, I think.

My partner thinks I am a psychologist because when we met, I was an OT in in-patient MH unit. I've been working in a different specialism for years and he still tells his friends I am a psychologist.

That sounds like a reasonable level of understanding to me. I wouldn't expect someone to understand the technical detail of their spouse/partner's job, unless they're in a very similar field, but I would find it quite weird if they didn't understand the basic premise of the role.

It depends what you mean by 'understand'. I write scientific software, my parents could get the idea though not much detail - they were teachers, DF chemistry, DM essentially no science education.

MiL otoh was totally clueless. She was one of the many women of her generation who was intelligent but appallingly ill-educated. Firstly she thought that with our chemistry degrees DH and I could run a pharmacy. Then (at a point where our first jobs after doing our PhDs were at the other ends of the country because they were specialised) having got the idea I did something with computers came out with 'oh, X uses computers, she works in a travel agency, couldn't you do that?'

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves Yes, I can understand the premise- I think because it really is quite a simple one. Businesses want websites but they don’t have the creative or technical ability (or the time) to make one themselves so they get an artist and a programmer to make one for them.

Jobs in finance are a lot harder for me to understand- because I know so little about economics and the world of finance generally. So unless someone is an accountant or a financial adviser (I have some understanding of what these jobs are), I start to become unstuck very quickly in understanding what their job is.

I do listen, and I have been told in detail. I still don't get it. Yes, I know the vague category their jobs fall into - marketing, for example. In my mind, marketing means you do one of a) create adverts, b) buy advertising space, c) carry out/commision polls and such like for market research, d) schmooze people who might be persuaded to buy your thing, e) attend trade fairs and such like to promote your thing. My relative in marketing says that he does none of these things, and that in fact most of them are handled by different departments - creating adverts, for example, is apparently not marketing, when to me (as an outsider to private sector work) that would appear to be the primary role of someone in marketing. Another family member is a consultant doctor Except she now works in some job where you have to be a doctor to do it, but you have no patients, or teaching, or indeed any contact with anyone at all. She appears to mainly do literature reviews, but is very insistent that it is not a research role. If asked, I can tell people her specialism within medicine, but I have no idea what her actual job is. Many people don't understand what I do either.

I really don't think it's unusual for people to not understand what people in a different sector do. People have an idea, or at least think they do, of the main named roles - nurse, architect, police officer, barrister ... but their ideas are probably correct only in the broadest terms. And most other things are just meaningless words unless you've worked in something adjacent or have some point of reference.

My mum knows I am an accountant, but seems to think that means I give financial advice. Which is why a few years ago she went all the way into town on the bus to ask HMRC about capital allowances when that was actually something I knew about.
My MIL should know I'm an accountant but thinks I'm a PA and keeps asking me what I do to 'look after' my boss. Funnily enough she never asks her son (also an accountant) what HE does to look after HIS boss.

I reckon this hits it on the head.

I don’t think it’s uncommon for someone not to not understand your job, though it’s disappointing when they ask you about it, you tell them and they don’t listen. But in OP’s case the mother is insisting on calling her a secretary. No disrespect to secretaries but OP is doing something much more specialised and complex; her mother is talking the job down.

YANBU OP. It’s incredibly annoying that a woman who isn’t even that old has the view that women don’t have senior or professional jobs - therefore you can’t possibly have a job like that.

Is she weird about female doctors too? Or has she got used to that?!

Hahaha I thought it was standard for parents not to understand what their kids do.

Marketing covers a vast array of different jobs. Technically advertising is a different profession and sector - though the two areas do overlap - as in advertising agencies report into marketing departments.

I've worked in marketing all my life (the sexy consumer facing side as well) and at least 75% of my work is pricing and budget management.

I don't think it's either of those options in the first paragraph. Your husband's job, for example, sounds comprehensible the way you've put it, but it also sound like it couldn't possibly take more than 30 minutes a week, maybe more if he has to chase other people up to tell him what they've spent. Your job, I still have no clue what that means: what is a 'computer system' - like a software programme (Word or Excel or similar)? And who is the user? Do you have one business who pays you to make computer programmes for their own business and it's tailored to them, e.g. they sell sandwiches and you make a sandwich ordering app? Or you research how a computer programme that anyone can buy is received by all users by asking for feedback and then including the improvements in the next software update? Or you contact customers who have bought a piece of software and tell them what features it has that they could be using, and train them to use it? I'm sure you think that you've explained the job in a way that a non-IT person would understand, but I can't make head nor tail of your sentence.

What this thread demonstrates is just how many people completely take for granted the things around them that ‘just work’, and have no idea what goes into making them work.

There’s a definite theme running through this thread - parents and in-laws recognising that their sons have senior, professional jobs that need qualifications, but pretending they don’t understand their daughters’ similar jobs and assume that they’re secretaries or PAs.
I’ve never heard of a parent saying their son is a PA when they don’t understand his job. Same old sexism as we had in the 60s.
My in-laws’ tiny minds would explode if they knew I was way more qualified than DH, have a far more senior job and earn several times his salary.

Sure, but if it was your DH or your DC actually doing those jobs, you would probably take a bit more time to understand and get your head around it?

I think this is very true. My son I spoke of in a previous post who does something with marketing and algorithms that I don't quite understand helps determine which products show up in which shops in which countries.

In the case of my relative, it is also not clear to me what it is within his company that actually needs marketing. They don't sell anything. They are a bank, but they don't have branches or do any of the things that I understand a bank to do. They only deal with companies, not individual customers, and they don't want any new ones. So why they need to employ anyone at all to do any marketing is a mystery to me, let alone a whole department of people who do none of the things that seem to be marketing. I half-jokingly suggested to my relative that it sounded like a huge money laundering front for some mafiosi. He is convinced that it is a legitimate business.

'13 is head of personnel at the gas board'

I have given up correcting them in all of the various inaccuracies of that statement

This is true for me, but I do recognise my ignorance. I know that I don't know how most of the modern world really works. I don't pretend to know or not realise that there's anything to know.