YOUNG people still believe certain jobs are better suited to one sex or the other, research has suggested.

According to a survey by O2, which questioned 2,000 people under 18, more than half believed girls were more suited to be nurses, nannies or hairdressers.

And 37 years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, more than one in four young people said a man should hold that role.

Sarah Miilligan, managing director of Mudeford-based IT company Elite Technologies, was the Daily Echo Business Mother of the Year at the 2014 Dorset Venus Awards.

She has worked in IT for 15 years and says attitudes have changed. Despite always loving computers, she studied health and social care at college instead of the entirely male IT course.

“I completed the course, enjoyed it, but didn’t think it was the right career path for me and joined the business course. It was during this time that I started helping with the computers within the college and started studying in the evenings about the IT work I was helping with,” she said.

The IT manager at her college saw her passion for the subject and gave her the opportunity to set up and run the IT at an offsite college campus.

“It was pure luck I got into the career I wanted,” she said.

She added: “Throughout the years since my first IT role, I have had mixed reactions from others regarding my skills – the worst being interviewing and employing someone who confessed on their first day they thought I was the admin or HR girl and hadn’t realised that I would be the IT manager and their manager.

“Careers advisers need to ensure personality traits and skills like ‘helping people’ could just as much be used in helping to support their computers or IT processes as it could mean heading for a nursing role.”

Freelance photographer Hattie Miles became a press photographer on the Daily Echo in 1987.

“Often people were very surprised when a woman turned up to take photographs. I remember one particular incident when, on New Year’s Eve, I covered a bomb hoax at the Sovereign Centre with a male agency photographer.

“A police officer radioed HQ and announced that there was one photographer and a female attending.

“When I first covered AFC Bournemouth matches, I used to get crowd chants directed at me. ‘There’s a lady on the football pitch, there’s a lady on the pitch … get your **** out,’ they’d chorus. That would never happen these days. It would be totally frowned upon.”

She pointed out that the Echo had always had female photographers since then. “Now, of course, the Echo has Sam Sheldon who does an excellent job,” she said.

She added: “There are situations when it’s a positive advantage to be a woman. My job quite frequently required me to photograph people who were quite distressed after bereavement, witnessing a horrible situation or recovering from attack.

“A lot of these people feel very vulnerable and having a woman turn up at the door is, I think, less stressful for them. There are, of course, no rules. Men and women who do my job have an amazing range of skills and can put people at ease in the most difficult circumstances.”

Ben Walliman is director of Kids Love Nature, which runs Children’s Nature Nurseries at Avon Heath Country Park, Durlston Country Park and Lymington, all of them rated outstanding.

When he trained as a primary school teacher at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, there were six men training with him, out of 150 students. When he went on to teach at Heatherlands school in Parkstone, he was the only man in the school and the only male in Poole’s reception and nursery classes.

He said traditional ideas about gender roles still held away. “It’s the woman that looks after young children because that’s the way it’s done and always has been done,” he said

“I did it purely because it was the most enjoyable ages to teach for me. I quickly found that I was able to bring quite a different dimension.

“If you’re somebody who’s the opposite sex to what’s typical, I think you get an opportunity. Although I didn’t really play on it, I was able to progress quite quickly through the career.”

He said it was important to have men dealing with early years children, many of whom did not have a male role model at home. “The traditional mother and father, married, at home together with children, is now less likely than a broken marriage maybe with another partner,” he said.

“With one girl, I was the first man she had ever encountered properly and it took a long time to progress and build a relationship that we were able to work with together.”

O2 suggests found many young people turned to parents for advice, and more than half could not recall anyone from business visiting their school to talk about work.

Sarah Milligan said: “If my 15-year-old-self had heard from a woman in IT, I just may have had the confidence to join that IT college course and entered the career the primary way.”