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When I wrote my memoir,
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the publishers were really confused.
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Was it about me as a child refugee
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or a woman who set up a high-tech
software company
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back in the 1960s,
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one that went public, and eventually
employed over 8,000 people?
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Or was it as a mother of an autistic child?
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Or as a philanthropist who has
now given away serious money?
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Well, it turns out, I'm all of these.
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Let me tell you my story.
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All that I am steams from when
I got onto a train in Vienna,
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part of the kinder-transport that saved
nearly 10,000 Jewish children
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from Nazi Europe.
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I was 5-years-old, clutching the hand
of my 9-year-old sister
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and had very little idea as to
what was going on .
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"What is England and why am I going there?"
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I'm only alive because so long ago,
I was helped my generous strangers.
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I was lucky, and doubly-lucky
to be later united
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with my birth parents.
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But, sadly, I never bonded with them again.
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But I've done more in the seven decades
since that miserable day
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my mother put me on the train
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than I would ever have dreamed possible.
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And I love England, my adopted country
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with a passion that perhaps someone
who has lost their human rights
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can feel.
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I decided to make mine a life
that was worth saving.
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And then, I just got on with it.
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(Laughter)
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Let me take you back to the early 1960s.
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To get past the gender issues of the time,
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I set up my own software house
at one of the first such startups in Britain.
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It was also a company of women,
a company for women,
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an early social business.
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And people laughed at the very idea
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because software, at that time,
was given away free with hardware.
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No body would buy software,
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certainly not from a woman.
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Although women were then coming out
of the universities
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with decent degrees,
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there was a glass ceiling to our progress.
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And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often.
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And I want opportunities for women.
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I recruited professionally-qualified women
who'd left the industry
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on marrriage or when their first child was expected
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and structured them into a home-working
organization.
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We pioneered the concept of women
getting back into the workforce
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after a career break.
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We pioneered all sorts
of flexible work methods:
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job shares, profit sharing, and eventually,
co-ownership
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when I took a quarter of the company
into the hands of the staff
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at no cost to anyone but me.
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For years, I was the "first-woman" this,
or the "only-woman" that.
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And in those days, I couldn't work
on the stock exchange,
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I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane.
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Indeed I couldn't open a bank account
without my husband's permission.
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My generation of women fought
the battles for the right to work
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and the right for equal pay.
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Nobody really expected much
from people at work
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or people in society because
all the expectations then
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were about home and family responsibilities.
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And I couldn't really face that,
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so I started to challenge the conventions
of the time,
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even to the extent of changing my name
from Stephanie to Steve
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in my business development letters,
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so as to get through the door
before anyone realized
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that he was a she.
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(Laughter).
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My company called Freelance Programmers,
and that's precisely what it was,
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couldn't have started smaller:
on the dining room table
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and fiancee by the equivalent of
one hundred dollars in today's terms,
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and financed by my labor and by borrowing
against the house.
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My interests were scientific,
the market was commercial.
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Things such as payroll, which I found
rather boring.
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So I had to compromise with operational
research work,
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which had the intellectual challenge that
interested me and the commercial
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value that was valued by the clients.
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Things like scheduling freight trains,
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time-tabling buses, stock control,
lots and lots of stock control.
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And eventually, the work came in.
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We disguised the domestic
and part-time nature
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of the staff by offering fixed prices,
one of the very first