WHY WOMEN IN SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY START BUSINESSES

Karen Roem: I've always wanted to work for myself but I've always found it a bit... well it isn't scary but when you look at it, it looks scary. You think well, will I be able to do it? Will I be able to earn enough money? So I think that when I turned 40 actually it was that age thing, that I thought that if I don't do it now, that will be it.

Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I'm Cobi Smith. That was Karen Roem, who runs her own IT training company. Not everyone has their heart set on founding a company, like she did. A lot of people do think the idea of running their own business is scary. So what motivates women in science, engineering or technology to start companies, if it hasn't been their ambition in the past?

Corinne Frydman: Originally I didn't think of becoming freelance, I was looking for a job as an in-house translator, but it was 1992 and the job market was quite inexistent at the time, the in-house translators had been sacked and they all became freelance, and that's when I decided to do the same basically. So I came from France having had, well, maybe a couple of experiences, I had worked for a couple of companies as an in-house translator in the software industry, but having no idea about the British market as a freelancer. That was hard work, but I was lucky.

Cobi Smith: That was Corinne Frydman, another foreign-born woman who, after freelancing in the UK for years, set up Webwide Translations. The women I interviewed often said travel or immigration prompted their move to self employment. Martina Hornickova is another example of this.

Martina Hornickova: To be honest I have never wanted to have my own business (laughs) but then the situation came around and instead of me coming to the UK and starting completely from scratch as my education will not be very much approved here internationally and stuff, so instead of starting from scratch doing jobs that, basically I would have to go quite a few years backwards, you know, seven years backwards in my career, instead of going forward. So this was the only option, have my own business, to basically do what I'm good at and what I love doing, and achieving something as well.

Many younger women, like Diane Turner, see enterprise as a way to have a stimulating career, as well as a life outside of it.

Diane Turner: I didn't really think about starting a business when I first left my last job. The reasons why I left were I was starting to work too many hours, my whole life was revolving around work, working long evenings, working weekends, working everything and not doing anything else. And so I decided to quit, go off to Fiji for six weeks and survey coral reefs, and then I decided to have a think about what I wanted to do with my life and when I come back, then decide. So when I came back I had a few job offers but a few people mentioned that I should start thinking about my own business because I was good at training and good doing other various things with science in the specialised area that I'm in, which is gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which are analytical techniques, and so I printed out a load of information from the Business Link website and I took that with me, and I sat on a desert island and I read through it all, and I discussed it with my husband and we came to the conclusion that yeah, it might be a good idea. But also as well, talking to the people who'd offered me jobs, if my business didn't work out, then I could always go back to them and see if those jobs were still available, because hopefully I'd still have those skills they'd wanted. So therefore there was nothing to lose, I could just go and start my business and see how it went and yeah, and fortunately it's gone well.

Kate Jackson: I kind of was forced into running my own business because one of the downsides of working, living in a rural area is that actually there aren't many options for a graduate, you know, I wanted to stay within sort of zoology/animal behaviour and apart from moving somewhere else and working in another zoo or just getting a normal graduate job in a normal office somewhere there actually wasn't much of a choice really so I was kind of forced into setting up on my own because of the lack of job opportunities.

Cobi Smith: And have you ever looked back? Do you ever think it would be nice just to get a paycheck at the end of the month?

Kate Jackson: Yeah, yeah sometimes, and every now and then a job, well actually very occasionally a job will come up that I'll see and I'll be tempted to apply and on one occasion I did apply for a job, but as soon as I'd sent the application in I thought actually I don't really want it (laughs) I quite like running my business, it sounded like a really good job and financially it would have been, you know, helped me to be quite secure but actually I really enjoy what I'm doing so yeah I'm quite happyƒ with it really.

Cobi Smith: That was Kate Jackson, another young entrepreneur, who typifies the trend of women starting businesses in rural areas where there's a lack of suitable employment opportunities. Speaking of employment, Sally Rose was set up in business with a group of ex-colleagues when their workplace shut down.

Sally Rose: None of us had any experience in raising money, we'd all just been scientists working for a big company for a long time, and decided it was an opportunity to not just move into another big company and do the same thing but to do, to try something different. But obviously because you've been made redundant, they closed the site, you all have a year's money to live on, so you can afford to take a year out. So as a team we actually worked very well and had people that could fit all the roles that were needed.

Cobi Smith: An established team was important to software engineer Sylvia Knight, as well.

Sylvia Knight: It wasn't the way I thought it would happen, I think a lot of it was the fact that there was a team of us with different skills and so we felt we could all contribute and, you know, I knew nothing about marketing or anything like that but other people did, and finances and so on, because we had this team at SRI we already thought well, we've got a head start for a business because we all get on.

Cobi Smith: Some women get bored in their jobs and find a business is a good way to explore their professional interests, like innovative engineer Anne Miller.

Anne Miller: One of the reasons what that I wanted to do something new. I got very good at what I was doing, my team was very successful at it, and I'm a creative person, I like new challenges, and when I thought, do I want to spend the next 20 years of my life doing this? My heart sunk. I mean, we just turned the handle and innovations popped out. So I definitely wanted to do something new and I had got very interested in this idea about, what is it that makes people and organisations creative and how do you foster it? And how do you do develop it? So I was then very fortunate that I was part of TTP group and TTP has a very sort of wise process for letting, incubating new businesses so I was given a little bit of space to basically push this idea around in parallel with running my team. I did make some rather late nights to develop this and see if it turned into an idea. So it definitely helped that I was given the sort of space and permission and backing to explore this. And then basically it developed, for the first few years I ran this as a subsidiary to TTP and then in 2004 I had the opportunity to, to basically buy the business free from TTP so it became completely independent. And that was really partly because it had rather moved away from just being a sort of technical-focused business, so I was working with all sorts of other groups, people in the NHS, people in NGO's the public sector. But the sense of freedom and the ability to, you know, be my own boss and do my own thing, and develop my own language and way of explaining things is, is very special actually, it's very valuable.

Jenn Monahan: We're both environmentally motivated, so the aims of the business are fundamentally to reduce carbon. But it's, it's to allow us control over our lives as well. To be able to make a decent living doing what we're both passionate about, but I mean we're both women, we're both wives and we're both mothers. So we have to fit all of that other stuff in.

Cobi Smith: That was Jenn Monahan, who set up her energy consumption consultancy with a friend Jenn touched on a big motivator for women in male-dominated industries who start enterprises.

Berenice Mann: I was made redundant, I went off to have my second child and then I was made redundant when I was about to come back to work, so I started thinking about other options. For a while I just sort of used the time to be a mum and be at home for a couple of years and then I started to panic and think 'oh I haven't got a career anymore' (laughs) so then I went to work for APU which is now Anglia Ruskin, working with companies in the area to get them to do joint projects with the university, called knowledge transfer partnerships. I did that for a couple of years but I was having to put three children through into full-time childcare, and when my childcarer left, or she was about to leave, I started reassessing the situation, and I decided I had a huge number of transferable skills and I decided to put those to work for myself and I started my own company.

Cobi Smith: and Berenice Mann there, with another angle on the big motivator - that is managing to pursue a career that uses her science training while also having time to care for family. We'll explore this important issue more in another episode. This has been the SETwomen podcast, funded by the East of England Development Agency and YTKO. I'm Cobi Smith, thanks for listening.

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