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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 as a woman who set up a high-tech
software company back in the 1960s,
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one that went public
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and eventually employed over 8,500 people?
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Or was it as a mother
of an autistic child?
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Or as a philanthropist that's
now given away serious money?
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Well, it turns out, I'm all of these.
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So let me tell you my story.
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All that I am stems from when
I got onto a train in Vienna,
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part of the Kindertransport that saved
nearly 10,000 Jewish children
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from Nazi Europe.
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I was five years old, clutching the hand
of my nine-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 by generous strangers.
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I was lucky, and doubly lucky
to be later reunited
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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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when 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 only someone
who has lost their human rights 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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But 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
because software, at that time,
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was given away free with hardware.
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Nobody would buy software,
certainly not from a woman.
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Although women were then coming out
of the universities 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 wanted opportunities for women.
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I recruited professionally qualified women
who'd left the industry on marriage,
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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
going back into the workforce
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after a career break.
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We pioneered all sorts of
new, 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 or in society
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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 financed by the equivalent
of 100 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
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and the commercial 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 of the staff
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by offering fixed prices,
one of the very first to do so.
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And who would have guessed
that the programming
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of the black box flight recorder
of Supersonic Concord
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would have been done by 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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and eventually, they were adopted by NATO.
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Our programmers -- remember, only women,
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including gay and transgender --
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worked with pencil and paper
to develop flowcharts
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defining each task 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 onto
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 opportunity 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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(Laughter)
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When I started my company of women,
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the men said, "How interesting, because
it only works because it's small."
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And later, as it became sizable,
they accepted, "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 three billion dollars,
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and I'd made 70 of the staff
into millionaires,
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they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!"
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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You can always tell ambitious women
by the shape of our heads,
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they're 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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(Laughter) (Applause)
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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", she said.
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"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 an only child,
a beautiful, contented baby.
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And then, at two-and-a-half,
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like a changeling in a fairy story,
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he lost the little speech that he had
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and turned into a wild,
unmanageable toddler,
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not the terrible-twos.
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He was profoundly autistic
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
(????) called 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
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and other IT ventures,
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and 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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would 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 and in humility.
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Work is not just something I do
when I'd rather be doing something else.
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We live our lives forward.
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So what has all that taught me?
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I learned that tomorrow's
never going to be like today
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and certainly nothing like yesterday,
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and that made me able to cope with change,
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indeed, eventually to welcome change,
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though I'm told I'm still very difficult.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)