Adapting to social pressures sometimes comes with a cost, but can also lead to more worthwhile practicesĪndrews was the kid we can all either remember or relate to who in elementary school sat at the front of the class and was always raising her hand to answer the teacher’s questions. Andrews’s relationship to music has informed her interest in math and technology, though she loves both elements of her life for their own specific pleasures. It’s more comfortable for her to think of composition and arranging in numeric terms. Music for Andrews is about numbers and the relationship between notes. While her friends were documenting their compositions with letter notes or marks on sheet music, Andrews was using numbers to map out her composition. She recently discovered this while developing vocal harmonies with her peers. She is still involved in artistic and musical endeavors, participating in community theatre (she’s just finished playing a lead role in The Wizard of Oz, in which she participated with two of her children) and performing as a vocalist for local musical groups.īecause Andrews learned music in the Suzuki method, taught by ear as opposed to reading sheet music, her approach to composing is unconventional. In high school, she performed as well as composed and recorded music using MIDI, at the time a newly developed, state-of-the-art music arrangement programming tool. Music has been important to Andrews since childhood. The study instead demonstrated that the more you study music, the better you’re going to be at math. After studying more than a thousand middle school students over the course of ten years, his hypothesis that there was no correlation was proven wrong. Martin Bergee co-authored a study at the University of Kansas, published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, examining a correlation between learning music and achieving higher scores on math exams. The math and science of music composition That’s when it gets really interesting.” For Andrews to pursue what she loved and felt passionate about as a kid she had to ignore an impulse to conform to constructed assumptions about gender, and instead follow her interest, a decision that requires some pluck. “What I loved about these types of projects, and what I continue to bring to my work is taking the technical and creative and combining them. Andrews followed her instincts without fear of what others might think. Though it wasn’t the expectation, she joined the boys in their design and build work. The group automatically aligned with certain parts of the project with the assumption that the boys would tackle making the car, however Andrews was drawn to the science and creativity required to produce a motorized vehicle. They devised and constructed a self-propelled vehicle, designed costumes, wrote music and a script, and developed replicas of architectural landmarks. She remembers an Odyssey of the Mind project where her team had to study and present four aspects of culture. I loved the whole thing as it was artistic, creative and challenging.” When I was a kid we did ‘Odyssey of the Mind’ which is a competition where a small group of students team up to create a themed presentation and also do problem-solving challenges like building free-standing structures that interact to solve a problem.
“As I look back I think I was always naturally drawn to the ‘how’ of things, and math came naturally.
Childhood interest in STEM can be brought to bear in tech careerĪndrews had a proclivity for science and math from an early age. Like many of the women in leadership at WEX, Andrews has remained true to her values and her singular focus of doing good while growing her career. Disarmingly warm, open and kind, Andrews is the kind of person you want on your team, in your pack, in your book club. Heather Andrews, Vice President and GM of the Americas for WEX, has spent a long career in technology as the field has evolved, both for women and as the internet changed the way we live. The percentage is creeping upward from 25.9% in 2018 and 26.2% in 2019, but there is still a long way to go for women to have significant involvement and influence in the STEM-led industries. However, while women make up 52% of workers with a college education, only 29% of the technology workforce is made up of female workers. In recent decades, women have made inroads back into this field. Women continue to make gains in their careers but are still lagging behind in STEM fieldsīy the late 1960s, as the industry became more central to economic and business capacities which were historically dominated by men, the propensity for males to step into innovation, development and leadership roles quickly outpaced that of women.