CAREERS IN TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISE

Agnes Aubert: It is true that, often, men seem to have a more technical-minded way to approach things. But then on the other hand, it’s only fairly recently in our history that females have been brought up in such a way to encourage this. So you will find more and more females whose brains don’t work in a radically different manner than men’s brains work. Even though there might be inherent differences, I think I nature’s there, nurture is there too, and now we have a chance to evolve. You know, not so long ago, if you said to men there’s going to be an awful lot of very capable female scientists they wouldn’t have necessarily believed you, but that’s because science wasn’t open to women. Now it is, and actually a fair amount of them are really, really good, really inspiring, and really innovative in the way they work.

Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I’m Cobi Smith, and that was Agnes Aubert, who runs an IT training company, talking about women in technology - the focus of this episode. Here’s Sylvia Knight, now principal software engineer at a technology startup.

Sylvia Knight: The first job I ever had was at school, was doing technical support over the phone, and when I would pick up the phone the customer would always say, ‘oh, can you put me through to technical support, you know, I have this query’, that kind of thing, because they would assume I was the switchboard girl. I mean, they would be fine once I said ‘well, you are through to technical support’, but yeah, it’s a good job I wasn’t getting paid by how many calls I took because quite often you’ve got just ten seconds of that, whereas men answered the phone, same intro, and yeah, the caller would launch straight into ‘their kids have mucked up the computer again’.

Karen Roem: When I moved into the IT side there were no women at all and it was really weird. I remember that in the support team even, they put us on the operator floor, because there were no computers like PCs, personal computers, I mean – I sound really as if I’m ancient – we only had all these mainframes, PCs were just starting up at that time so people wouldn’t be getting their own PC’s, but there were these big mainframes and all the operators there, and the idea was to have to support people on the floor and they could straight away see when there was a mad panic that there was something going on. But there were just no women there at all and that was weird. 

Cobi Smith: That was Karen Roem, who runs another IT training consultancy, talking about the early days in computing. Despite these experiences of women at the start of the personal computer era, it’s worth considering that women were amongst the first users of computers, as Rachel Jones, who runs an innovation and design consultancy, explains.

Rachel Jones: When I started off in computer there were a lot of senior women who had been effectively typists, and were so used to the keyboard that they became very senior in computing actually, as a result of taking that route. So there were senior women at that stage, so maybe it’s a dip at the moment until other people come through again. When I did my PhD I don’t know of any other women that were doing their PhDs in computing. There might have been one or two, but no. It hasn’t really been an issue for me, except since I set up the company I think. And when I worked in various organisations and was the only woman, that’s felt quite strange. I think it creates an atmosphere that I don’t think is particularly, you know, nice to work in a lot of the time.

Cobi Smith: But obviously it didn’t bother you so much that you weren’t prepared to be there.

Rachel Jones: No, that’s true.

Corinne Frydman: It’s changing. When I first started they were male, I’d never seen a female developer. My husband said ‘yes, I’ve seen a few times female developers where I’ve worked’, but it hasn’t been my experience. So it is changing, but very, very slowly.

Cobi Smith: There was Corinne Frydman, who runs a software translation company. Technology is a bit of a unique industry in that so much is done without needing to meet people face-to-face, so gender can be a non-issue when there’s no way of telling what people are like in the flesh. Here’s Sylvia Knight again.

Sylvia Knight: I do play around sometimes by registering myself at a meeting or something just as ‘Dr S Knight’ because that sounds quite masculine, then send some emails or whatever and it turns out that ‘oh, you’re female!’ That happens less actually. So I think just over the few years I’ve been doing it that times are changing, that people know not to assume any more. There was a company who got the list of all computer scientists in the year, and it was just initials and surname, and yes they sent me this whole pack about what a wonderful company they were to work for, and friendly, but they spoilt it just in the first letter, by writing to ‘Dear Mr Knight’. Because, you know, statistically yeah, 90% of the names they had were male, but it’s not the place to start making assumptions, when you’re trying to get people to work for you.  

Cobi Smith: So why do you think there are less women in technology?

Sylvia Knight: I think a lot of it’s a confidence thing actually. Because the hard core stuff is very, kind of, right or wrong and there is a bit of a confidence barrier for people socialised as female, and sometimes there’s a macho atmosphere. But I’ve not really noticed it myself, I mean I consider myself a fairly hard core computer geek and you know I’ve not had any particular problems, you know, in fact in some ways it’s helped, being female, because people remember me.

Cobi Smith: Of course, there’s a lot more to technology than the hard core stuff Sylvia is talking about. Here’s Martina Hornickova, who runs a software distribution company.

Martina Hornickova: I mean to be completely honest I’m not IT geek or IT person whatsoever. I love technology as long as it works. Once it doesn’t work I’m the first to want to throw out of the window my PC and stuff, but I love the way it helps people. I think technology generally is a good thing if you know how to use it and how to implement it as well.

Elena Punskaya: I think in technology it’s that feeling of something new. Something that’s changing or going somewhere, that novelty. Especially in Cambridge we’re sort of privileged because you are surrounded by absolutely gifted people. They are differently gifted, but they are all to an extent exceptional. And that starts with students. And therefore you’re in this unique environment when you kind of think that everything is possible, which is probably not the case. But it’s perception, and as they say perception is reality, therefore yeah, I think it gives you that confidence and energy because it’s also a very, very young place. Not necessarily because it’s full of students but because it’s full of ideas and hopes and everything is still about to happen.  

Cobi Smith: That was Elena Punskaya, who runs a technology startup, on the buzz associated with working in IT in Cambridge. But it’s hard to understand the excitement involved in such a new and innovative industry when you’re studying computing at school. Here’s Sylvia Knight again.

Sylvia Knight: Maybe we were in a golden age, the first home computers and it was all new and exciting, and yeah, my friend managed to attach a light bulb to a Sinclair Spectrum and he blew it up but we didn’t care. And I think it’s a teaching thing, all these people do manage to have really good fun on actually quite serious subjects that serves them well in their later life, much better than the learning how to word process at school. So yeah, if we could just translate the fun side into teaching I think that would interest the females who are a natural fit, rather than just turn them off.

Cobi Smith: So if people are thrilled by the idea of founding a technology company – not just working in some IT department - where should they start? Here’s Bev Hurley, CEO of a company that helps science and technology startups.

Bev Hurley: You need to go to uni because most enterprise and employment is at graduate level, so you need to have at least a first degree, if not a masters or a doctorate. That’s kind of normal, really. Unless you’ve got a really good idea already that you can think about commercialising. And then possibly one route would be to work for organisations like technology transfer centres within the universities, it’s a good first role to get into, because you’ll look, at licensing and patent protection and maybe a little bit of markets and so on, so it’s quite a good, broad, all-round way of getting into it. The other thing you could do is go and look at a venture capital house, the investors in science and technology, which would give you a totally different perspective, which is ‘can we make money out of this bit of science or technology?’ So you get a different grounding really, working for a finance house, but equally important, because most science and technology innovation needs funding, external funding. Especially if it’s got a global application, you can’t do it on peanuts, you’re probably going to have to go and raise several rounds of external funding. So if you’re looking to get into that field it’s a good idea to have that sort of perspective. But there aren’t many companies like us who really specialise in this how to take the product to the market bit, which touches on licensing and touches on patents and touches on – actually more than touches on funding. But it’s all about marking sure there’s a market there for that product, which is a step that people often miss out. They’re so passionate about their science and passionate about their technology, that’s their culture, they forget to think about ‘oh, I’ve got to sell something at the other end of the day’.

Rachel Jones: Personally I’ve loved it, I mean I think it’s incredibly hard work, and very unsocial hours, generally, because you’re working quite hard over weekends and things, but the flexibility you have can be fantastic. And you can actually get on and do the work, be less involved with the politics of the organisation. I’m really glad I set up my own company and I would encourage anyone else to do it, so do it, but I would try and reduce the risk as much as possible by finding a client that you could work with when you set up, so it’s a transition rather than all at one time.    

Cobi Smith: That was Rachel Jones again, on her experience of establishing a technology-focused startup. So, technology enterprise can be a rewarding and exciting career path – particularly if you have some business sense as well as computer skills. In our next episode, we’re going to look at how to get women equipped with these skills, and how to get more women working in science, engineering and technology. 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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