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 happy
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.