I am Londoner born and bred, but I have also lived in Kuwait and New York. I started my career in trading rooms in the early 80’s, where women were very much in the minority and there was no one of colour at all. I have watched the industry change out of all recognition in the last 45 years.
We who work in finance understand how much it has changed, but there are many people in the wider world who don’t even consider finance as a career as they ‘know’ they will be surrounded by men in red braces. I want to help address this and encourage school leavers to consider finance, even if no one in their family has ever worked in the business, to increase cognitive, ethnic and socio-economic diversity across as many career paths as possible.
I have a MA in Mathematics from Oxford (not that I have ever used it at work). I travel as much as I can, especially road trips to see the life between the cities.