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

@CMOTDibbler

Ooh interesting. I used to work at a well-known particle physics organisation and was involved in the proton therapy collaboration projects they had going on at the time.

I love maths. I did a BSc in Theoretical Physics and an MSc in Financial Maths. I then went on to become an actuary, working in the pensions field.

Now, I'm an academic, teaching actuarial science to undergrads and doing my PhD on an actuarial topic.

I use maths day to day and think of myself as an applied mathematician rather than a physicist or actuary.

There are very very few jobs that aren't made easier or enhanced by an understanding of numbers and logic. It's a bugbear of mine that people in the UK specialise so early. I think everyone should be doing maths and English (communication equally as important as maths) until they leave school, and preferably a MFL too.

@CMOTDibbler you totally know my DH

I work for a creative communications agency and I
deal with invoicing, spreadsheets, budgeting, analysis reports, etc

I work in a senior leadership role international in development. I use maths all the time. Things like developing and reviewing budgets and forecasting, measuring financial performance, analysing success rates for campaigns, designing monitoring frameworks and targets for projects, understanding and communicating statistics from our work on the ground... I only did maths to GCSE (got an A but preferred languages/humanities) - I’m not a natural mathematician and numbers don’t click for me like they do for some, but I love the logic side. I certainly never realised how much I’d use maths professionally.

I did A level maths but was not a natural and the teaching was poor as taken by someone who was not a qualified maths teacher (and the same was the case in the science subjects except biology). However, I have used maths as a solicitor, tax adviser and business manager and every day life.

On the male/female divide I found that there were some young kids who were amazing at maths and the boys were much more vocal in demonstrating their abilities until we got older when that changed. It was mostly boys who didn't reach their potential though later on. However, more girls were stronger at language skills and gravitated to that.

@FloconDeNeige I do know people who work there! I've dabbled in MC modelling in my past too, and I'm fascinated by molecule design stuff. One of the big radiotherapy things now is the interplay of the immune system with irradiation and how we can change that by giving drugs (and how the irradiation changes the drug response)

@MathsyUsernameGoesHere - my DH does a lot of work with actuaries (not pensions though) and he loves all of that. Is your DH a MedPhys person?

Nope. Maths has been of no use whatsoever. Nearly 50, the only use has been splitting the bill on a night out or calculating how fast the bus will reach the stop before I can get there. Absolutely serious.

I was ok at maths at school - not great though not bad eitherI didn’t particularly like it though but went on to do a degree in Economics which is quite maths heavy. I didn’t have A level maths so they gave us a crash course in Maths and stats and it suddenly all made sense.

I didn’t pursue a career in economics but went into IT, specifically Databases.
I use maths every day, from numbering systems (binary, octal, hexadecimal though not so much these days), to estimating for size, growth etc, logic, basic arithmetic and algebra and my favourite, set theory for SQL querying. I love a Venn diagram.

Ahh maths, I literally love mathematics.

It teaches so much; logic, reasoning, pulling knowledge from various topics and breaking up one big problem into much smaller manageable problems.. to name a few.

Maths is everywhere whether you like it or not, if you want to understand the world it’s a hell of a lot easier if you have a good grasp of maths.

I’m almost qualified, I chose a maths heavy subject to study and I’ll continue on with that at postgrad.

There are barely any women in my company, they do a good job of not treating me any differently though, which I’m really grateful for, I’ve heard some horror stories.

My first job after university was as a computer programmer in financial services - I had to have a good understanding of maths, and in fact part of the recruitment process included a lengthy maths test. I'm still working in finance and still using maths every single day.

I didn't study maths beyond GCSE though; a good grounding and a logical way of thinking was enough to get me into that first technical role.

I have a career in financial markets data. This has involved downloading, analysing and charting data from financial and capital markets. It's not super high level maths, but I have used a lot of percentages, converting currencies and excel formulae which require a good mathematical understanding.

I'm happy to provide more information.
I'm a chartered civil engineer and I work on design and construction of roads, railways, bridges, canals and buildings. Increasingly the job is about sustainable ways of delivering the infrastructure that keeps society connected. Doing maths/science got me into my engineering degree course and it's part of the job every day, directly in design or in commercial/financial aspects. There's also plenty of English, history, geography, art and science.

It's a really satisfying career, it gets you out and about, every project is different and you really get the "I built that" feeling. I have never been short of work and the 25-30% women in the industry, whilst a minority, make a substantial impact.
There is such a diversity of jobs and careers in STEM for many different skills and interests. It is really too important to leave it all to the boys.

Of course there are many other great jobs in the arts, humanities and medicine, we don't expect all girls to suddenly become scientists. But to maybe five or ten percent who are good at maths/science but wavering, put off by the stereotypes or because they aren't clear on careers - don't miss out!

It is really too important to leave it all to the boys.

Amen to that!

@tweeters It's a really satisfying career, it gets you out and about, every project is different and you really get the "I built that" feeling.

I'm quite envious of civil engineers for this feeling. My dad was a civil engineer and I still get a little bit dewy eyed when I drive over "his" roads and bridges. There is a layby on the road between Kyle of Lochalsh and Lochcarron which is always going to remind me of him. Make sure you point yours out to your children if you have them.

@Tweeters has put my feelings as a civil engineer very eloquently. I love my career (possibly not my current workload but hey ho), and couldn’t dream of doing a job where I sit at a desk all day. I use maths for construction design, pump capacities, calculating water flow rates, load bearing, project accountancy, estimating material quantities, modelling flood zones, modelling pollution routes. I use maths every in different ways. I don’t love maths, but I am not scared of it, and

“My” first project was the neighbouring McD’s and Pizza Hut in Hillsborough, Sheffield. My most recent project was a pumping station that will protect the thick end of 2000 houses from flooding. I’ve built roads, houses, pubs, post offices, supermarkets, flood defences, cleaned up contaminated land, refurbished 100 year old structures.

My DD is 9. She excels at maths and wants to be an actuary. She used to want to be an astronaut, until she realised that when you go to space it’s for months at a time, not just a day trip. She also wants to be a world champion mountain biker (and is fully conversant on gear ratios!).

I got there eventually - qualified accountant, but really struggled with mats as a child - not sure if a form of dyscalculia, but would reverse numbers, couldn't tell the difference between 6's and 9's. Overcame that with remedial maths teaching, and doing maths with Chinese characters that a friend of my mum's taught me.
Could never fathom equations and algebra, although I had to master manually calculated standard deviation to pass my exams.
I am not the most numerate of accountants, but probably more numerate than most non-accountants that work with me. So although maths is not a strong point, I'm not bad - and I think the fact that I don't always get it means that I am more able to empathise with less financially aware colleagues in getting the point across and help them develop their skills,

My teaching job isn’t mathsy, but maths knowledge helps me in basic ways: percentages, rounding up, averages, working with spreadsheets...that kinda thing.

Helped me count the resurected zombie threads.

I'm a programmer who did a humanities degree albeit with some maths/statistics.
Spatial visualisation, logical reasoning and numeracy are very important skills. Mathematical ability has a strong correlation with these.
Everyone is capable of understanding lower level maths/stats with good teaching. The reason for 'maths anxiety' is that some people get it quicker than others (those whose spatial vis is naturally better for example) and shit teaching, leading kids to doubt themselves.

I was ok at maths but not that good, a friend at uni changed the way I look at it. Now I'm very much better and the patterns and way of thinking I learned in maths makes me a very good software engineer.

@sbhydrogen numeracy and logical reasoning are two separate things. I was always slow to perform numerical operations and bad at spatial visualisation... but logical reasoning I'm very strong in. I got by with just the latter and as I figured out my spatial reasoning improved as well. Numeracy we have calculators for.

I bet if you learnt mathematics now with your experience you'd pass with flying colours! :D you're better than you give yourself credit for.

@Chemenger

I will have driven over your Dad’s roads many times!!

And now I’m wondering if he had anything to do with this road?? (photo attached)

Honestly you don’t need to be in a STEM career to use maths. I sell fitted bedroom furniture and I regularly have to measure rooms and work out what size doors to use, the angle of the chamfer on the edge of the door, the height of the plinth, depth of cupboards, the gap between doors to allow enough clearance for the hinges, and all sorts of stuff.

I need maths to prepare stats for my job, but I hate it. Had to sit my maths GCSE twice, barely scraped a C. I was good at physics, but absolutely terrible at maths?! No idea why.
Being awful at maths had an extremely negative impact on my career choices.

@Suzi888 do you feel, maybe, that physics is a sort of applied mathematics so rather than being dry unrelatable symbols it has meaning?

I find that some super complex things just don’t go in, I can perform the calculation but I dunno what the hells going on. THEN they apply it to a situation like waves and bam.. those boundary conditions make sense now.

t i need to sort statistics particularly percentages.

i think people who are good at maths think everyone can do it - but i can't. im not pleading maths dyslexia - i have a degree - but simple maths to others is not so simple for me - anyway to answer your question - i wish there was less focus on fucking pythag and algebra - becuase for most people it is percentages, multiplication, subtraction etc that affect their daily. i have never had to use pythag in my life and i have never used algebra in my grown up life.