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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 to do so.
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And who would have guessed that
the programming of the
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black box flight recorder of Super-Sonic Concord
would have been done by
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a bunch of women working
in their own homes.
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(Applause)
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All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach,
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and a simple telephone.
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We even used to ask job applicants,
"Do you have access to a telephone?"
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An early project was to develop
software standards
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on management control protocols.
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And software was and still is a maddeningly
hard to control activity,
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so that was enormously valuable.
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We used the standards ourselves,
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we were even paid to update them
over the years,
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Eventually, they were adopted by NATO.
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Our programmers, remember, only women,
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included gay and transgender,
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worked with pencil and paper
to develop flow-charts
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defining tasks to be done.
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And they then wrote code, usually machine code,
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sometimes binary code,
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which was then sent, by mail,
to a data center
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to be punched into paper-tape, or card
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and then re-punched, in order to verify it.
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All this, before it ever got near a computer.
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That was programming in the early 1960s.
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In 1975, 13 years from startup,
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equal opprtunity legislation came in
in Britain
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and that made it illegal to have
our pro-female policies.
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And as an example of unintended consequences,
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my female company had to let the men in.
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When I started my company of women,
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the men said, "How interesting that it only
works because it's small."
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And later, as it became sizable, they accepted
that yes, it is sizable now,
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but of no strategic interest.
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And later, when it was a company
valued at over 3 billion dollars,
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and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires,
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they said, "Well done, Steve!"
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(Laughter)
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You can always tell ambitious women
by the shape of our heads,
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their flat on top for being patted patronizingly.
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(Laughter)
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And we have larger feet
to stand away from the kitchen sink.
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Let me share with you two secrets of success:
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surround yourself with first-class people
and people that you like
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and choose your partner very, very carefully.
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Because the other day when I said,
"My husband's an angel",
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a woman complained, "You're lucky,
mine's still alive."
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(Laughter)
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If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires.
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But in my case, it came in the midst
of family trauma and indeed, crisis.
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Our late son Giles was our only child,
a beautiful, contented baby.
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And then, at two and a half,
like a changeling in a fairy story,
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he lost the little speech that had
and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler,
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not the terrible-twos, he was profoundly autistic,
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and he never spoke again.
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Giles was the resident in the first house
of the first charity that I set up
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to pioneer services for autism.
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And then there's been a groundbreaking
(something) school for pupils with autism
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and a medical research charity again,
all for autism.
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Because whenever I found a gap in services,
I tried to help.
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I like doing new things and making new things happen.
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And I've just started a three-year think tank
for autism.
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And so that some of my wealth does go back
to the industry from which it stems,
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I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute
and other IT ventures.
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The Oxford Internet Institute focuses
not on the technology,
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but on the social, economic, legal
and ethical issues of the Internet.
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Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago, now.
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And I have learned to live without him,
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and I have learned to live without
his need of me.
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Philanthropy is all that I do now.
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I need never worry about getting lost
because several charities
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quickly come and find me.
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(Laughter)
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It's one thing to have an idea
for an enterprise,
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but as many people in this room will know,
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making it happen is a very difficult thing
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and it demands extraordinary energy,
self-belief and determination,
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the courage to risk family and home,
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and a 24x7 commitment that borders
on the obsessive.
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So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic.
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I believe in the beauty of work
when we do it properly