Profile
Job: Economist
Organisation: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
Years in public service: 1
My grandmother/mother was a…
My mother went to university and trained as an accountant. She worked as an accountant for around 10 years until she gave up work to bring my brother, sister and I up, which I wholly admire.
My maternal Gran went to Grammar School and completed A levels. Unlike the boys in her class who were encouraged to go to University, she was expected to go to college.
Alongside one other girl in her year, she manged to battle to go to University. After graduating she went into teaching but was expected to get married and settle down.
Despite working, her salary was not taken into consideration for the mortgage when buying a house. After having children, she stopped work to look after them.
My paternal Grandma was brought up in Germany and trained to become an Export Correspondent in the English language. She made the decision to give up her work in Germany to come to England where my Grandpa lived.
As the UK was not in the EU at the time, she was only allowed to take up certain jobs where she had to live where she worked. She therefore decided to live with a family looking after their children. This was a job with low wages and little time off.
She had to carry an Alien’s Certificate and report to the Police if she left her address for any length of time.
Only after being married was she able to take on a more responsible role where she worked reading contracts for music producers before having children and staying at home to look after them.
Whilst bringing up young children, she studied a 3 year part time university course on Western European Studies. She has since gone on to help twin her current town with her home town in Germany.
She had kept her German nationality but lived in England so despite being passionate about being allowed a vote, she was not able to vote in either country.
After living in England for several years, she decided to apply for British nationality and was allowed to vote, however this was before dual nationality and therefore meant her having to give up her German nationality.
Me in a paragraph
I have recently graduated from the University of Bristol after studying Economics.
I love both playing and watching sport – anything from running to playing Korfball to supporting Southampton FC. I enjoy taking up sporting challenges and have recently run a marathon and have previously ridden in a 100 mile cycle sportive.
I also like travelling and getting the opportunity to experience different tastes and cultures.
My role
I work in an analytical team, Energy and Security Analysis, within BEIS looking at new nuclear plants in the UK.
Over this past year I have worked on several projects such as analysing whether it would be more beneficial to consumers and taxpayers for the UK to have a fleet of nuclear power plants built by one developer or if competing developers should be implemented.
I have helped conduct analysis that was fed up to the Prime Minister and Chancellor, and have enjoyed gaining skills outside my day to day role for example by taking up a data science project.
I am part of the Economics Fast Stream who rotate annually, so come September, I will be in another team within BEIS – One of the things I enjoy most about the Civil Service.
If I had a magic wand, what I would do to accelerate gender equality?
I would make sure senior boards had a fair representation of women on them.
Alongside this, I would like to see women being equally represented on panels/ presenting at talks. In having this I hope it would encourage more women to have role models and see visually that getting to that level is possible.
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