For a quick reality check take a look at a maths jobs site such as www.math-jobs.com/uk.
How much of this does everyone need to know? A. There are three reasons for learning maths: technical jobs; everyday living, where the need is so much more than in the past; and what I call logical mind training — a feel for how maths and logic works.
And if we look closer at the women Nadella was specifically addressing, the reality is fairly grim: a gender pay gap exists on every level of Stem [science, technology and maths] jobs.
Of all science, technology, engineering and maths-related jobs, tech presents a high level of gender segregation, with only 19% female computer science graduates.
Women are concentrated in teaching, health care, clerical work, social care and sales; they are underrepresented in manual and production jobs, maths, physics, science and engineering and in managerial jobs, particularly at the senior end.
Even though there are fewer jobs directly related to pure maths, there are still jobs.
After all, in his inaugural post, he tried to drum up pity for himself by claiming to have three jobs, using funny maths where each aspect of the same job – rightwing pundit – counted as a separate job (which led many freelancers and bloggers on the left to point out that most of us have at least seven or eight jobs using the Erickson job-counting system).
However, she discovered that she didn't have to excel at maths to do the job.
"It was in 1977, for a job teaching maths to engineers, and the all-male panel decided that as a 24-year-old woman I wouldn't be able to control a class of male engineers," she explains.
