Girls are heavily underrepresented in maths and other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. Reporter PAUL NIZINSKYJ spoke to former Southend High School for Girls pupil Rachel Riley about how that needs to change.

STANDING in a room filled with more than 60 girls all busily solving advanced maths problems, you’d never know there was a national problem with encouraging young women to take up the subject.

Then again, this is Southend High School for Girls, and this event has been organised by head of maths Sarah Imbush and Year 5 pupils from all over Southend are being tutored by sixth form students.

There’s also the added bonus that darting around the room in burgundy is maths whizz, Countdown presenter and Thorpe Bay local Rachel Riley.

Rachel was herself a Southend High School for Girls pupil before studying maths at Oriel College, Oxford, and coming out with an upper second-class honours degree.

For the 29-year-old, leaving an all-girl environment to study maths came as something of a shock when she started at Oxford.

“Because I went to Southend Girls, it wasn’t even on my radar that boys and girls were different at maths. It never came up in the slightest.”

“Unfortunately, there’s a national problem, and there’s this misconception that girls aren’t as strong as boys in things like engineering, sciences and other STEM subjects, and more boys go into those subjects as a career.

“There’s been a lot done to change stereotypes by showing girls women who look like them going into these subjects and it’s good to have people from the same background who have gone to study these subjects at university or become engineers.

“People you can relate to who have done things that you wouldn’t have thought you could do because you couldn’t see the steps in the middle.”

As well as a relative lack of role models, Rachel says she also believes the way girls approach things in the classroom can also lead to them feeling discouraged.

“Girls are more likely to be perfectionists,” she says, “whereas boys are quite happy to put their hands up and get things wrong.

“Girls approach things in a different way – if they don’t get everything right first time, they can be discouraged, and you need to be taught that it’s a good thing not to get everything right all the time. That it doesn’t matter if you get something wrong and you don’t have to be Einstein to study a STEM subject.

“If you enjoy them, you can carry on.”

Georgina Schmincke, 17, is maths captain at the school and has applied to study maths at Cambridge. She says she had a similar shock at university open days – but found inspiration in Rachel’s example.

“Going to an all-girls school, I’ve always been surrounded by girls doing maths so it’s normal,” she says.

“But when I’ve been going round to different university maths lectures for open days, it’s been quite a revealing experience, because you walk into the room, sit down, and as it starts to fill up, you become surrounded by men.

“It’s strange because you sit there wondering where all the women are but Rachel has definitely been an inspiration, especially as a Southend girl, because we often get stereotyped here in Essex.”

Stacey North, 17, is another of the further maths students helping the year five pupils with their maths and says she thinks it is important to get girls into maths early – and has also found Rachel a strong role-model.

“I want to go study maths at university and I think starting off at a young age and getting involved in harder problems helps to expand their knowledge and gets them interested,” she says.

“Rachel has been a big inspiration to me because she went to Oxford to study maths and I’m applying to Oxford, too.

“It’s inspiring to see how well she’s done coming from the same environment I’m in at the moment.”