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BARRIERS FOR WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS IN SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I'm Cobi Smith. Before we consider how we might change work and society to promote greater participation of women entrepreneurs in science, engineering and technology, I want to first ask why we should do this. Do we really need more change, since there are now laws in place to enforce equality? Isn't the playing field already equal for men and women?
Fiona Marston: Well it can't be, I mean how many biotech companies are there in the UK and how many women CEO's are there? And if you look in science, how many women undergraduates go into science, and of those, how many of those get to professorial level in academia? And I think you'll find that while you might for quite a long time have 50-50 male and female in science, there's actually single digit percents who get to professors as women. I don't know the stats, but I think, I think you'll find, and that's similar for running businesses. So why is that? And I think partly we're self selecting, you know I think you have a career, but you have children and you may make that positive choice and there's nothing wrong with that, but equally you've got to convince people to back you. And I don't know, it's, I can't sort of statistically prove it to you, but I just, my own experience is that nobody will ever say to you why they won't back you, or you know, why they don't find you backable, but…
Cobi Smith: That was Fiona Marston, CEO of Novacta Biosystems, speaking about women in biology. Life sciences is an interesting area to consider, because women do make up a good percentage of undergraduates. Geraldine Rodgers from Cambridge Enterprise shares her views on why women are less common in bioscience enterprise.
Geraldine Rodgers: It's not undersubscribed as far as women studying it, the life sciences, so you might expect of all technology areas you'd have a higher percentage in that. And I guess if you looked at most biotech companies and people who are working in sort of biotech entrepreneurship, that's perhaps where you'd find women more often than maybe other areas of technology. But even so, they're underrepresented.
Cobi Smith: And why do you think that is?
Geraldine Rodgers: I wish I knew. I guess there are social reasons. I'm not an entrepreneur, as I explained to you before I think it's not really fair to say that I am, because I haven't set up my own company, run it and persuaded people to invest in it. But if you take me as a typical example, my background has been: do a first degree, do a PhD, get a job in industry, then I actually joined a spinout company from that industry, the big company I worked for, they spun out a smaller company. So I guess you might describe me as having been a founder of a spinout company because I was part of the founding team. Then I got married, then I had a child, and then I sought working with the friendly employers. Not that my small companies I was working with are unfriendly but they don't do things like, you know, have crèches and holiday play schemes and things like that, like employers like the university for example. That's not the only reason I came to work for the university but it's one key reason for a woman, so there are social reasons for it I think. Maybe there are behavioural reasons as well. Perhaps women don't have the same sort of level of aggression. They have the same level of drive, just different circumstances. Or perhaps it just doesn't suit a woman's psyche so much to sort of be in that high risk environment. Or maybe they're married to a man who… the other situation I've come across is couples where you've got the male partner of the couple involved in his own start up business and the female, equally highly qualified and equally capable, recognising that someone has to be earning a stable income, and she's the one that elects to do that. Now that reflects my own situation because my husband set up his own company and I made the decision almost subconsciously, you know, okay well I'm going to stay in something stable, fairly secure, you know, where there's a reasonably guaranteed income. And I think maybe that's the judgement some other women make too, particularly if they're in a couple where the man is entrepreneurial and they want to go ahead and realise their ambitions and all that kind of stuff, and so the woman elects to be the more stable breadwinner in the less risky situation so that's another possible reason. I honestly don't know the answer to it.
Annabel Sedgwick: I think that might be just where we are generationally. I mean, I think that in, if you look at it in ten years time I think that might not be the case because we've got lots of women scientists coming up now who are spinning out ideas and companies and you know ten years ago perhaps there wasn't that same number of coming through. I think also, I mean there's a huge biological fact about women who work, and the fact is they have babies and they have families and I think that where men have that kind of perhaps ambition to go, go, go, go I think that when women have a family, and I have a family so I'm in that situation now, I think sometimes women reach a point where they just think 'I'm kind of happy where I am, I've got my life in balance, I've got time to spend with my family, I've got a job that I enjoy and I find challenging, I don't actually need to be the person on the board of directors of that new spinout biotech, I'll just carry on coming up with some ideas', so I think that's… it's not a glass ceiling because the women that do want to go, go. But I think that there are fewer women that want to keep going that whole hog than they would have felt perhaps in their, you know, maybe mid twenties before they had children. I really think that has a lot to do with it, I mean certainly from my experience of where we work now I think that perhaps people that have families are quite happy to kind of just stay on a fairly even keel. Yeah, you want to progress, and be interested, and be challenged, but you're not so worried about conquering the world. Maybe that's a really bad thing to say, I don't know! laughs)
Cobi Smith: That was Annabel Sedgwick, Managing Director of a science communications agency. The message seems to be that setting up a biotech company is challenging and risky enough, so when you add family responsibilities, it's just not a route that appeals to many qualified women. But a lot of women, particularly in areas of science and technology beyond the life sciences, feel there's more to it than purely personal decisions. Berenice Mann.
Berenice Mann: Particularly in the physics department there's noticeably far more males. In any physics department, even at Essex, you know there was probably 45 people on our course at Essex in our year and five of them were women. Which is a reasonable ratio, but I mean at Imperial when I did the Masters course there were 14 or 15 of us on the course and there were two women, and as you looked at the boards of lecturers, there would be, you know, one or two women lecturers out of a hundred, you know as you go up the scale obviously subsequently there are fewer and fewer women at the top as role models.
Cobi Smith: And did that affect your outlook at that stage?
Berenice Mann: Um, not really, no, I mean it's pretty much something you're used to if you work in physics, you're used to being one of the few women in the group basically so you know, at that stage it wasn't a big deal. I have to say I went to a girls' school actually so you know, it's the complete opposite of my initial education where it was all girls, then suddenly to go into an environment where it's mostly male, so it's quite a change I suppose, but I think it was tempered at Essex by the fact that there were quite a few other girls on the course. And at Imperial there was one other girl and that was the first time they'd ever had more than one woman on the course actually so it was quite a novelty for them (laughs).
I think there's still a huge old boys culture out there, you know, I think that in same way that I've said I quite like working where there's a balanced environment, you know men are very comfortable working with other men, and they find it quite uncomfortable, they're not quite sure how to deal with women a lot of the time who are in senior positions. I went to a company once and I'd borrowed my boss's car, kind of the company cars were pool cars and if you were going out you were supposed to use a company car not your own car, so I just turned up in this huge BMW, and the guy I was seeing, talking to you know, he saw the car rather than me and he said 'oh you must be very important', and I was like, 'yes, but it's nothing to do with the car', you know I didn't tell him it was my boss's car I just sort of played off on it basically you know, good for you, you think I'm really important, but you know, what would he have thought if I'd driven up in a battered old mini or something, you know? And that's kind of sometimes the attitude you're up against. And I just think that's, it's quite difficult to contend with, but you know clearly if someone like that was in charge of a company, you know, they might not be employing women in positions of seniority because they don't expect them to be in those positions.
Libby Mitcheson-Smith: Well I think that if you look back to a few years ago it just wasn't the done thing for women. Women are more, I don't know, having to look at motherhood, and I can't bear that because that's just not the kind of person that I am. I obviously love my daughter and love my, you know, my family but at the end of the day I have to work. You know I don't have to work for money but I have to work for me, as an individual. I can only speak from my own point of view not from others, but I do think it's kind of like the old boys club where it's expected to be a male business or you know it's kind of what men do. And I do think that women are definitely breaking down those barriers though and there are more women branching into that arena, but I think that typically it is a male world and it's male people who are actually going to be interviewing as well, and I just think that you know they think well, especially with the laws that are in place now as well you. know with regards to women, you know maybe pregnancy and things like that, that they just don't want to take somebody on because it's a huge investment, a huge overhead, and then to have them you know as I was told 15 years ago that you know, women are going to go away and have babies and what's the point of training and putting them into this kind of role if they're not going to stick at it?
I do think that individual organisations should make a stand and say look, you know, this is our business, it's our investment, and it's our choice, and this is the way that we would like to run things. Within my company you know, I look at both male, female, I don't care what their colour, creed, whatever, you know, it's are they capable of doing the job?
Cobi Smith: Libby Mitcheson-Smith there, talking about working in technology – both from the perspective of an employee, and an employer. So, times are changing. But these women have highlighted the role government – and individuals besides women themselves – need to play in ensuring that everyone gets a fair go. We're going to discuss how women think the playing field could be levelled further 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.
