Why do ambitious women have flat heads?

When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child
refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that
went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic
child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of
these. So let me tell you my story.

All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved
nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my
nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. "What is England and why
am I going there?" I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. I
was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded
with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my
mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my
adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can
feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. And then, I just got on with it.

Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my
own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of
women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea
because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. Nobody would buy software,
certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with
decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too
often, and I wanted opportunities for women.

I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first
child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the
concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of
new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took
a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. For years, I
was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock
exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account
without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to
work and the right for equal pay.

Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations
then were about home and family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to
challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "Stephanie"
to "Steve" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone
realized that he was a she.
My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have
started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in
today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. My interests were
scientific, the market was commercial things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. So I
had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that
interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling
freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the
work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed
prices, one of the very first to do so. And who would have guessed that the programming of the
black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women
working in their own homes.

All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to
ask job applicants, "Do you have access to a telephone?"

An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software
was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the
standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were
adopted by NATO. Our programmers remember, only women, including gay and transgender
worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done And they then
wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data
center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. All this,
before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s.

In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it
illegal to have our pro-female policies. And as an example of unintended consequences, my
female company had to let the men in.

When I started my company of women, the men said, "How interesting, because it only works
because it's small." And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now, but of
no strategic interest." And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and
I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!"

You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being
patted patronizingly. And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink.

Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people
that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said, "My
husband's an angel," a woman complained "You're lucky," she said, "mine's still alive."

If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family
trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby.
And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he
had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler. Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly
autistic and he never spoke again. Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first
charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking
Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism.
Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things and making
new things happen. And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism.

And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also
founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses
not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet.

Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have
learned to live without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about
getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me.

It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know,
making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and
determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment that borders on the
obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it
properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else.

We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's never going
to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change,
indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult.

Thank you very much.