Dr Woodcock said there was an increasing demand for mathematicians to help understand quantified information and datasets such as those generated with Facebook data which can be used in everything from infrastructure planning to election predictions or where to focus resources in commercial operations. “It’s good to hear there is some financial recognition [of data skills] but in some ways, it's not that surprising if you look at the headlines recently with Facebook and the large amounts of data that companies have and are using to make decisions from,” Dr Woodcock said. “There’s more awareness that being a professional mathematician doesn't mean that you're going to sit in an office with a pencil sharpened at both ends for the rest of your life.” Anaesthetists knocked out surgeons from the No.1 spot as the profession with the highest income in the state, pocketing an average taxable income of $334,882. Surgeons, internal medicine specialists, psychiatrists, and other medical practitioners filled the second, fourth, sixth and seventh spots on the list.

The average Australian takes home $59,215 in taxable income a year. Dr Woodcock said doing maths professionally is not a field for “a lonely guy with a calculator”. "You get out into the real world and speak to people who have quantified information or datasets that they need to draw conclusions from, whether that's infrastructure planning, investment planning, election predictions on where you should focus resources or commercial data to help people buy your product and not somebody else's.” Based on Friday's figures, if you’re a woman looking to beat the gender pay gap, the ATO has some advice: take up goat farming. Out of almost 1200 recorded jobs, less than 100 paid women more than men on average. They include receptionists, school teachers, beauticians – and goat farmers.

“To find professions where women earn even slightly more than men, the ATO has had to go to goat farming and beauticians,” says Roderick Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute. “Some of these are obviously low-income professions, where minimum wages come into play and even out that inequality. It really shows the gender gap is still there.” All these figures are based on an individual’s average taxable income, which is how much you earn before tax but after deductions for items such as charitable donations or work-related expenses. Keep in mind these figures are based on tax returns, so do not distinguish between full-time and part-time workers. Also, the figures are based on the mean income and can be skewed by those who earn far above the rest of their profession. For example, neurosurgeons earn more than $500,000 a year on average, while a general surgeon takes home about $300,000 on average.

This probably explains why female goat farmers appear to out-earn males – there are very few women in the profession, increasing the chances of one high-earner skewing the average. There are some differences in the highest paying jobs for each state. Nationwide, mining engineers are the eighth highest paid on average, but Victoria and NSW don’t present as many opportunities for miners. In Victoria, the tenth spot is taken by air traffic controllers and in NSW it's the mathematicians. “There's nothing glamorous or fun on my tax returns," Dr Woodcock said. "Maybe there should be."

Instead, the great benefit of his job, Dr Woodcock said, is the diversity of people you can work with. "I've worked with environmental modellers looking at the Great Barrier Reef, geographers looking at riverbed erosion, I worked with sports scientists looking at talent development, and finance people on insurance type stuff,” the applied mathematician said. The problem in Australia is that we're "not nearly" producing enough mathematicians to cope with the demand, he said. "We're currently almost at the worst-case scenario where there is awareness of the commercial and political impact of good analytics and not quite the skills there to do it well,” Dr Woodcock said. “A lot of this [analytics work] is done by the slick bloke in a $2000 suit who talks a good game, who may or may not actually know what he's doing.