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 a woman who set up a high-tech
software company

back in the 1960s,

one that went public, and eventually
employed over 8,000 people?

Or was it as a mother of an autistic child?

Or as a philanthropist who has
now given away serious money?

Well, it turns out, I'm all of these.

Let me tell you my story.

All that I am steams from when
I got onto a train in Vienna,

part of the kinder-transport that saved
nearly 10,000 Jewish children

from Nazi Europe.

I was 5-years-old, clutching the hand
of my 9-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 my generous strangers.

I was lucky, and doubly-lucky
to be later united

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

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 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.

(Laughter)

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.

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.

No body 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 want opportunities for women.

I recruited professionally-qualified women
who'd left the industry

on marrriage or when their first child was expected

and structured them into a home-working
organization.

We pioneered the concept of women
getting back into the workforce

after a career break.

We pioneered all sorts
of 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 people 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.

(Laughter).

My company called Freelance Programmers,
and that's precisely what it was,

couldn't have started smaller:
on the dining room table

and fiancee by the equivalent of
one hundred 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 Super-Sonic Concord
would have been done by

a bunch of women working
in their own homes.

(Applause)

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,

Eventually, they were adopted by NATO.

Our programmers, remember, only women,

included gay and transgender,

worked with pencil and paper
to develop flow-charts

defining tasks 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 into 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 opprtunity 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 that it only
works because it's small."

And later, as it became sizable, they accepted
that yes, it is sizable now,

but of no strategic interest.

And later, when it was a company
valued at over 3 billion dollars,

and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires,

they said, "Well done, Steve!"

(Laughter)

You can always tell ambitious women
by the shape of our heads,

their flat on top for being patted patronizingly.

(Laughter)

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,
mine's still alive."

(Laughter)

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 our 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 had
and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler,

not the terrible-twos, he was profoundly autistic,

and he never spoke again.

Giles was the 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
(something) 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

quickly come and find me.

(Laughter)

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 24x7 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 not 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.

(Applause)