SUBJECT: MNHQ here: How has maths helped your career?

[AnnaCMumsnet]

Women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and maths careers. The ratio of men vs women working in STEM has stalled at 74:26

There are lots of possible explanations for this, but the stats seem to show that disparities start fairly early. Girls are substantially less likely to take scientific, numerical and technical subjects at A Level, and an study from a few years ago showed that across OECD countries, girls are more likely than boys to express a lack of self-confidence when tackling maths and science problems - even though girls often outperform boys at GCSE level in these subjects.

We’ve been talking to Maths4Girls, who are trying to redress the balance. They say:

“We seek to dispel gender stereotypes and inspire more girls to pursue maths and the opportunities it can bring. We do this by introducing female role models to young girls aged 11 - 14 so they can share their inspirational career journey, and give insight into their amazing career.”

Some of the workshops Maths4Girls have run (for free) include using maths to solve crimes, to persuade people, and to save the world (by tackling the really big global challenges such as climate change).

We know from thousands of conversations on Mumsnet over the years that we have many brilliant women here who excel in maths and maths-related fields, so to support Maths4Girls in their mission we thought we’d try to find a few role models of our own.

How has maths helped your career? How do you use maths, from day to day, in your job - and what sort of difference does your job make in the world? Do you have any thoughts about what might have helped you when you were studying or breaking into your chosen field - or do you have any tips for the upcoming generations of girls and young women thinking about building a career in STEM?

(Feel free to namechange if your story is too identifying!)

Thanks
MNHQ

I'm an accountant, I've only got GCSE maths but that's fine, I just need to be numerate. I work with so many non finance people who don't have the basic skills to work out percentages, currency conversion or, as HR struggled with last week, can recognise that 69 + 3 doesn't = 74. If you want to get to a senior position in any area I think being able to count is always useful, because basic calculation errors can throw doubt on your whole level of competency.

My A-levels included maths, physics, chemistry and computer science. I loved maths as a child, and enjoyed it right through my education. But it wasn't cool to be a girl who was good at, or enjoyed maths. There weren't much in the way of role models until I was a bit older, and discovered Stargate SG1 (Samantha Carter was my idol for a while ) Thankfully my DDs seem to have more examples of bright, academic girls available. We're all pretty geeky, and they seem to have found friends who are similarly so.

I now work as a software developer, so I use the logic, and patterns I learnt in maths all the time. Plus the familiarity with, and comfort in using, figures, helps with so many things, in and out of work. (I also use trigonometry for DIY!)

My Dad fought the school so I could do Maths and physics at A level, they felt I'd be uncomfortable in a boy heavy class. But I wasn't. Meet lots of lovely young men!

Personally I hated primary maths, reciting times tables every morning was awful. But as maths got harder and more complex I found it more interesting and easier.

I studied a multi disciplinary science, worked as a government statistics officer, and used maths all the time when working on massive government research grants.

I still hate times tables. Primary maths has been DHs job.

I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering and I’m a senior lecturer in that subject. I’ve forgotten much of the high level maths I once knew but use the bits that I remember on a daily basis. The concept of modelling things with maths is still there even if sometimes I can’t solve things without looking stuff up now! Obviously I know many women who have great careers in Engineering, and who have used their engineering degrees on other areas like management consulting, accountancy and teaching.
For most people what is needed is numeracy, not maths. So the ability to do arithmetic calculations, not to set up and solve equations.

This is a sore subject for me. I got an A in maths and English gcse and my school guided me towards English A level and actually said 'we tend to find girls look good at maths at GCSE but more of them falter at A level' . I cant believe i listened to their advice! I dont know that I was ever headed to a stellar career in STEM, but I did end up working as a Marketing Analyst which used a lot of statistical knowledge which I had to larn as an adult. I no longer do that job due to my child's SEN but it was a great career. I got to play with interesting data all day and turn it into business objectives

I don’t have a traditional STEM role, I work in HR, though I have maths A level. My role covers leadership development, career management, as well as diversity and inclusion and well-being initiatives. I use maths for budgeting and in contract management with suppliers, but the most important way I use maths is calculating what actually works to improve things. In my field there are a lot of ideas that are well intentioned but don’t actually make much difference. I use statistics to test and then prove impact before spending lots of money. I also know my way round research papers to see what outside evidence there is.

I loved maths at school. It was one of my favourite subjects. I left school at 16 with good GCSEs and went straight into work.

I decided to go into payroll in my early twenties, had children early and then completed a degree in payroll management while my children were young. I'm now a highly skilled and experienced payroll manager on a good salary.

Just goes to show that you don't have to take the traditional route of a levels and uni to end up in a decent well paid job. And I love payroll. Maths is in my role every single day whether I'm doing manual calculations for people or creating formulas in excel.

I was encouraged enormously by my all girls school at maths and then moved to a boy heavy school for sixth form...where I was the only girl in my maths/further maths set. It was never an issue because I could hold my own with the boys. Chemistry degree and PhD where maths was essential (molar calculations!) and then a chartered accountant where the exams (whilst challenging) were easier for me because playing with numbers is my thing. I’m now in a well paid accounting role where numbers are essential. I also get drafted in to rescue other departments (hard stare at HR) where they can’t set up simple average calculations in Excel reliably.

I’m a huge advocate for accounting as a career for women because the variety of decently paid roles available gives choice. I stepped out of a Big 4 firm when I had DS2 because both DH and I wanted to work FT which wasn’t possible if I was going to push for partner (or not without more external childcare than we wanted). I went in house and I haven’t limited my career, just changed the parameters.

I’ve got a first class mathematics degree. Gave me lots of transferable skills for my career. I’d recommend anyone pursue a maths degree, they are highly sought after by employers.

I am a graphic designer, I use maths all the time. I probably thought getting into a creative industry that maths wouldn’t feature much, but so much of print is based on precision, right down to the millimetre. I used decimals a lot, and would argue colour mixes have to be pretty mathematical.
I got a D in GCSE maths, I retook it and got an E, I figured I would just not get maths. But having done homeschooling I have found maths is taught very differently to how it was in the 80s/90s, it seems to allow more methods for finding answers, and there is less rushing. Teaching of English however, and it’s current obsession about grammar over content, is depressing.

I'm a senior civil servant. My role isn't maths based, but I use mathematical skills every day, to balance budgets, calculate the cost and impact of policy decisions, work out population trends, you name it. We have dedicated staff to do a lot of these things so technically I could get away with having much weaker math skills, but having them gives me a real advantage and makes life much easier.

I planned to do chem, physics, maths and further maths at A level. Dropped both before Christmas of lower 6th as I was completely out of my depth. And swapped to Biology.
When I did my first degree I had to do 'extra Maths' at uni. By the time I did my PhD I was spending a significant proportion of my time modelling and using maths.
I use statistics and allometric modelling every day. Development of new and repurposed COVID treatments over the last year has involved a lot of scaling and modelling to get drugs from the vial to the patient. My DC will say I'm a biologist but maths and physics are the backbone of developing inhaled therapies, fluid dynamics, surface tension and optimising solubility as well as the more obvious particle size vs deposition area in the lung.

Maths is a language we all use. You can show a mathematical computation to a mathematician who doesn't speak English and they can still understand it. The same with graphs and charts: you can stand up and state whatever you like about proportionality and correlation, but put it into a graph or a chart and people can see it for themselves. Maths is brilliant.

I studied maths up to A level, then did a biological science degree with a fairly heavy maths and stats component. I did a PhD then spent another 8 years in academic research science, which involved a lot of day to day numeracy and data analysis skills. I now work in medical communications for the pharmaceutical industry and although I no longer do much data analysis myself I absolutely have to understand all the stats and modelling in order to do my job effectively. I love my job, it's varied and interesting, my colleagues are smart and awesome, and it's well paid

I'm coming from the opposite point of view. I was told in school careers advice I could never become a programmer without maths and I wasn't very good at it.

I did become a software engineer and problem solving and logic is definitely a major part of my job but I can't really say that I apply any maths routinely. Learning languages was more helpful really.

Yes, I would add that I'm no maths whizz - I hit my wall in the first year of my degree, and I'd never have coped with a maths or physics degree. Despite this I have derived enormous value from studying maths and stats in terms of understanding data and taking an analytical, logical and critical approach. You definitely don't have to be gifted at maths to benefit from studying it!

I'm terrible at maths. Ended up in HR as the antithesis of anything mathsy. As pp have said, data is everything now. I've been teaching myself analytics and excel skills (with the help of my Maths graduate husband) Even my fairly basic skills have made a huge difference to my credibility in being able to back up what I'm advocating with stats. Our industry is crying out for data experts.

I’ve namechanged for this. I did A level maths and was terrible at it, mainly due to the poor teaching I received. It was only as an adult I began to realise it’s connection to everything, and to be able to use it for my own needs both in my career and my hobby.

I’m an airline pilot, and having failed maths A Level I somehow managed to find myself at flying school (shh, don’t tell them! 🤣🤣) where the study of maps and charts, navigation, the curvature of the earth and how maps deal with it, all gave me an appreciation of trigonometry that I had not got from school. At school it was a dry topic full of formulas with no meaning. At flying school it meant the difference between finding Bermuda or not! It may be different now, but I feel as though not enough connections between maths and real life or professions are made in schools. While I failed my A level, I did leave school with an ability to juggle numbers in my head which has stood me in good stead, and I think the current drive to get primary school children comfortable with their times tables helps that. For work I have to be able to juggle numbers at speed to constantly recalculate rates of descent, distances to go, speeds, etc - it is all very simple maths but a quick confident ability with numbers is needed for it. There is a lot of reliance on calculators and phones to do the basic maths for people these days, but I cannot see how an ability and confidence with number shuffling cannot be put to good use in most careers.

As a hobby I take part in a sport that is part orienteering, part adventure racing, and again we are constantly juggling numbers in our heads. It’s a constant surprise to me how fearful people are of numbers and maths. I know so many people who will happily do a crossword for fun in their tea break, but give them a sudoku puzzle and they shy away from it. Their is a lot of fun to be had doing number puzzles and conundrums and it builds a baseline level of ability to manipulate numbers for the sake of the pleasure of doing it. My 10 year old son can do a simple Times sudoku, so I am sure most adults would be able to but many shy away.

I’m not a great mathematician, but I can see how it is essential to be able to deal with numbers, and I think that girls need to be made aware of this as much as boys. My daughter is an artist, but understands proportion, perspective, light wavelength and frequency in colour perception, etc are all just mathematical functions, and in applying these things she has learnt to her art she consistently produces amazing pieces, yet she is regularly told that art and maths are a surprising combination, and I suspect that this is something a lot of girls are told. Music and art are often considered ‘softer’ subjects but once the mathematical elements are understood it makes it easier to understand and progress. My daughter also plays the drums, and calls it counting with music. We both constantly count in our heads - she when playing, me when navigating. It would be great if girls were shown more of the ways that maths opens up both scientific and other professions without it being made to look too clinical and technical.

I'm a systems administration techie. I use numbers a lot - capacity planning for computer storage, power, networks. Converting between gigabytes and terabytes, from hexadecimal to decimal, from seconds to minutes or hours. But I think I probably do more than I need to because I can, and there are tools to do most of it, and pretty GUIs rather than the command line like it was 20 years ago, so you don't have to think as much as you used to. Some people like diving deep into performance stats to see where improvements can be made, but again, I think there is some personal preference here,people who like doing that, just as we have some who like building whizzy Excel sheets, or scripting things - because there's a team of us, we can work to people's strengths and preferences to some extent. In smaller organisations, you'd have to do it all (a lot of it's dev ops, now, but you still need people provisioning hardware behind the Cloud.)

Other tasks include measuring and calculating space in datacentres, in server racks, for cabling.

Many jobs will need numeracy for planning, budgeting and reporting, and it helps to have at least enough numeracy to understand your payslip, P60, overtime payments, maternity pay. Even with Excel and other tools, a better level of numeracy will help give a better understanding of what the different formulas and charts could fo for you.

Enjoyed maths at school... I now work in nutrition, so an understanding of statistics is useful.

I'm an architect and studied Maths to A level. Architecture is often thought of as a just a creative subject but maths is an essential part of my job everyday.
So many things such as calculating areas, converting units, calculating energy efficiency values, safe pedestrian flows and working out how quickly we can evacuate a building in an emergency.
Maths is an essential skill that allows me to turn my creative ideas into functioning projects.

I'm an organisational psychologist working in corporate HR. I'm trained in statistics from my study and I've always benefited from being more analytically minded than most and have got things done where others couldn't because I could make a simple financial model.

I'm now dual-skilling in analytics and data science and absolutely everything I do is eaten up with a spoon. The demand is huge. As PP have said the future of HR is in data and there's immense hunger for the skills.

Are you me?

Ooh spooky!

I’m in Switzerland?!!

I absolutely agree with your other points too. I am quite conventionally feminine-looking I suppose; I’m small, blonde, long hair, wear makeup etc. and I find that I’m unfortunately often judged as ‘a bit dim’ by outward appearances. Being highly numerate ups my ‘perceived intelligence’ as you say!

Although I did once use a bank card with my title on it in a coffeeshop and the teenager who served me asked if I’d found it on the floor!

I think I’ve reduced my perceived intelligence here though in prolific over-use of exclamation marks 🤪

I'm a physicist, and work for a company who make all kinds of products for medical imaging, and I specifically work on products for delivering radiotherapy for treating cancer.
Maths is key to my work in many ways, from modelling how radiation moves through people so we can really target their cancer and protect the rest of them, ensuring that the machines do what we need them to do, working out better ways of getting the radiation into the patient - but also in making financial models of the cost of developing new things vs what they can be sold for, working out strategies on service contracts to maintain equipment vs initial costs of machines and so much more. I am also involved in clinical trials where we have to work out how many patients need to try a new treatment vs the improvements we think we might get to get statistically significant numbers, then all the analysis of data afterwards.
There's loads more that I do, and that I need to understand what others have done, with maths on an everyday basis and its all for good, practical reasons (I do play with people who do big theoretical physics stuff, and it blows my mind, but my job is to take their science and help people with it).
My parents were unrelentingly positive about the academic and career choices I've made, but I've heard the 'oooh, I was never any good at physics' thing a million times, almost like people are proud of not being good at maths or physics. I always tell them I was crap at drama, so thats why I'm not an actor.
My sector of physics is around 50:50 representation, with some sub fields actually being women dominated btw.