149. Why Is Tech So Sexist?

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1:13hello and welcome to the rest is money with me robert peston steph sadly for all of us is detained elsewhere. She'll be back very soon. But I'm delighted to be joined by Martha Lane Fox. I mean, I don't even want to say how long I've known you for. Ten years, perhaps. Twenty, maybe. Marginally over. Martha Lane Fox, serial entrepreneur. In my experience, one of the most thoughtful, insightful commentators, analysts of where business is going. Currently, president of the British Chambers of Commerce. It's an absolute joy to see you this morning, Martha. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

1:56I thought I'd start with something sort of bang up today in the sense that it stems from a meeting we were both at recently of representatives of the creative industries. And I was very struck that in a room where we're all trying just to sort of be balanced and steady about the prospects for the creative industries, you absolutely lit up and suddenly got very passionate about the shocking fact that women throughout business are still sort of massively struggling, whether it's in the boardroom of established companies getting to the top the statistics you gave about how hard it is to get proper funding if you're a woman entrepreneur somebody creating a business these facts about what looks like endemic discrimination against women in business are really shocking yeah and they're depressing because they haven't moved much so the conversation wasn't it was about investment into the creative industry is such an important part of our economy to a half million people employed.

3:09I think it's 125 billion of contribution to GDP. And I was just making the point that so many of these businesses are small entrepreneurial businesses. And there's an opportunity, in my opinion, to increase that even further if we were to think about a more diverse set of entrepreneurs who are able to start those businesses. And I just qualify something you said. You said women are struggling. I don't think women struggle. Women are brilliant at their jobs. I think what's happening is that there are points in the chain of things that they might want to do in their career that are not skewed towards enabling that to happen as effectively as they could be.

3:41And one of those points is about raising money. And it is kind of horrifying that only 1.8 % of venture capital funding goes to female-only led businesses. In the balance of fairness, it is more if it is a co-founding team that is mixed, a man and a woman like Brent and I were back in the dawn of time at lastminute.com. But female-only businesses, it's horrifying and going backwards, which is even worse. It's marginally down from a couple of years ago. And that matters because you're not capping into the same pool of talent. There've been lots of studies about this. And one of the things that's been said frequently is that if women-owned businesses were scaled at the same rate that male-only led businesses were scaled at, it could add 250 billion to the economy.

4:24Now, obviously, there's a lot to unpick there, but that's a big number. So that is just the UK economy? That's just the UK economy. So why do you think that those who provide, whether it's seed money or scale-up money for businesses, seemingly prefer either male-dominated businesses or mixed businesses in some way? A whole host of reasons, but I'm going to pick three because for me, these are the biggest ones. The first is that venture capital itself is not very diverse. There are, I think, there are 7 % female partners of venture capital businesses now. Therefore, I think you just get a cultural phenomenon of just it's more risky to invest in something that doesn't look and feel like me.

5:15I mean, that's not to a person, clearly, but if you look at the numbers, that must be one of the reasons. So I think that structurally, it's really important to keep a focus on where the money is coming from as much as where it's going to. So male-dominated finance is part of the problem. Yes, absolutely. I think the second thing is that we know again, and I find sometimes quite hard to choose the right language here because, you know, it's often put culturally that women sort of lack confidence or women don't want to do the same things as men and women somehow don't have this urge to do the same kind of entrepreneurial style businesses.

5:46I dispute that. I think it's that we have constructed what success looks like in a very particular vein. And it doesn't always have to be like that. And I blame Silicon Valley a bit for this in the last couple of decades. So let's break that down a bit. What is the model of success that, for example, the tech industry has that, in your view, makes it harder perhaps for women? It's maybe just a model that women want to aspire to. So I think it is breaking things, going fast, scaling at all costs. You know, there's quite an aggressive sense that you have to be a particular way in order to be successful.

6:21And I don't think that's true. And I certainly don't think that's true anymore. So I think that cultural point is also super important. And it's not just about tech. I do think it imbues into other sectors. You know, being an entrepreneur is hard. It's a shame Steph's not here because she seems to be always starting about 16 different businesses. And I really respect and salute her for that. And she will tell you, I'm sure that that's the case. But it doesn't have to be that you have to follow a particular model. You know, you can do it in your own way. That's the great thing about being an entrepreneur.

6:47It's not flexible because you have to work really hard and it's tough. But it does provide a slightly different dynamic because you're determining how you want to build the culture yourself. So I think the fact that we have these kind of people that we look up to, supposedly, who are in a very particular vein doesn't help. So the kind of Elon Musk, super macho, let's destroy everything in order to build it kind of approach. Yep. And, you know, it's not just Elon Musk, though, is it? There are examples, I think, through all of industry and not just in tech. But I do think that's kind of dominating.

7:17There's obviously a famous example of somebody who at the time was deeply admired. Now there's quite a little revisionism going on about whether this person really did help women, who is Sheryl Sandberg, who became number two at what is now Meta and was Facebook. Where do you stand on whether Sheryl was sort of, in a sense, good or bad for women entrepreneurs? I think that that's a kind of slightly reductionist question. I do a bit. I think that I don't know. there's a lot of allegations that have popped around in the last period of time but in my experience of Cheryl she was extremely kind to me I remember particularly she sent me an email when I became a member of the House of Lords and said well done and I said I'm feeling a bit intimidated and she said don't be ridiculous you shouldn't be intimidated you should go into that space and own it she didn't have to do that I'm a diddly squat person to her so so your experience of her was very positive very supportive but I understand there's some complexity not only around her but also what she was saying, which is, you know, it's up to women leaning, which is part of it, yes, but I think there's also some structural stuff as we're discussing.

8:20I mean, I think we do have to recognise that if she thought she was going to reform Mark Zuckerberg, she singularly failed. Yes, and I don't know if she did think that. And I also think it's somewhat unfair to always put on the women that they were meant to go into a business and do the thing that was, you know, impossible because he's the founder, he owns the company, he owns most of the shares, He dominates the board. He's clearly the driving force in that business. And often it's the narrative is a woman comes in, they'll deal with it. Why? Why can't the man just be better as opposed to the woman having to be the person that makes them better?

8:53and just to finish on my three points we've got the finance we've got the cultural piece and then i think the final bit we do have to recognize is that from as early in education into a university into how companies are structured it is often true that women feel less confident about the spaces they're allowed in and to be risk-taking or to be more um you know ambitious and i i wish it was not the case but all the numbers show that's how women feel and we have to think very carefully. I don't think it's one bit. I don't think it's just school. I don't think it's just as you go into work. I think it's a huge number of factors.

9:28But it's important, again, to recognise that there is something that girls and then turning into women feel about their relative confidence levels in the workplace. And so therefore, it's another big part of it. So on that issue of confidence, it is 25 years since you were essentially the face of the growing optimistic British digital industry during the what we now think of as the dot-com bubble undoubtedly was a bubble when you set up last minute with Brent Hoberman do you think you were unusually confident as a young woman business person and if you were very confident where did that confidence come from it's hard to do that self-analysis sometimes isn't it I mean I think Firstly, I was 25 when we started lastminute.com, right?

10:16And I'm all generous. It was 28 years, I think, that we launched the business. And I think that a lot of it was just naivety, to be honest. I think that, you know, I really trusted Brent. It was Brent's idea, lastminute.com, and he generously shared it with me. And I think hopefully we turned it into something greater than the sum of both of us together. But I often think back to just how we just carried on. And I don't think I'd even thought five or six steps ahead. I really hadn't. And even when so many venture capitalists said, no way, we're not going to give you money for the business. We just carried on.

10:45And that's, I think, partly was youth and just inexperience, but partly, of course, I had an innate confidence. And I'm super lucky that I had a very stable family background. My father is an incredible person and never treated me any differently or expected that I was doing anything different to anybody else. And my mother was an entrepreneur herself. So I think all of that helps, of course. But also just that partnership that I was in with Brent, that gave me confidence because he was incredibly supportive. And, And, you know, really, we worked together very closely. So all of these different things helped me massively.

11:16But it hasn't been a life without serious setbacks. You had that appalling accident, which was life changing. You did pick yourself up and talk to me about it because it's such an important moment in your life. And it is relevant to a conversation I wanted to have with you, which is one of the things that absolutely everybody's talking about at the moment. is the extent to which disabled people should work, the extent to which the state should help disabled people to work, the extent to which employers have more responsibility to people who have disabilities. But it would be great if you didn't mind just talking about your own experience.

11:55Sure. I mean, I joke sometimes with my friends that I'm one of the only people on the planet to have survived a dot-com crash, a virtual crash, and then a real-world crash, and they just happen to have happened in relatively quick succession. So I left lastminute.com in early 2004. I was going to have a couple of months. off turned into not quite what I was expecting when I had a very serious car accident in Morocco in May 2004 and broke pretty much every single bone you can break without finishing yourself off. I discovered recently, actually, that I should be in the Guinness Book of Records because I have broken more bones and survived than any other woman currently on the planet.

12:28Seriously? Yep. I'm going to write to the Guinness Book of Records. Unfortunately, a man has pit me, obviously, by breaking one more and surviving. But anyway, I'm quite tempted just to break something else. I didn't even know doctors counted the bones. Yeah, they definitely do. I'm laughing, but it was actually a very funny matter. And I spent the next two years in hospital. I just remember actually within our office because you were somebody that journalists knew and it was a real palpable sense of shock and people were really anxious about you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, the anxiety and the thoughts helps because I was very lucky.

13:02And despite nearly dying multiple times in hospital after two years, I was home and then, you know, I've been able to build my life since then. But it is, you know, irrevocably changed. I am now a disabled person, not an able-bodied person. And I've been in hospital multiple times since then and live, you know, with the ambiguity as many disabled people do of what might happen. And I think that that's a very different framing to life to the one that obviously I thought I was going to have and also just gives you an insight about what that kind of disability can do to your capacity and your capability.

13:34For somebody who was so active and so successful, how hard was it simply to accept that you were disabled? It's only very recently that I have even really identified with myself as being a disabled person. You know, I walk with two sticks. I am disabled. And for a long time, I thought that because I didn't want to be only characterized by what had happened to me. And I wanted to get back to work and I wanted to still try and make an impact in this country. And I still wanted to use my small voice to try and do some things to help. That was just my own motivation for trying to continually trying to get better.

14:13and stronger. So it's only relatively recently, but now I'm more at peace with it at the ground, although as you're 52. And I feel as though now I also do have a bit more of a responsibility to think about it and help think about it in a way that can hopefully impact other disabled people's lives. When you do suffer this kind of traumatic change, how conscious are you or how anxious are you that, you know, basically society doesn't understand and slightly writes you off? You talk about how hard it's been for you to, in a sense, publicly accept that you're disabled. Is that because you were just worried you said you didn't want that to be how people sort of labeled you but is it also because you thought actually there's we talked about a different kind of discrimination just for women you know for example raising money and in other ways in business but it was it just you were very anxious you just didn't want to face that discrimination i think it's yes partly but also because you don't want to people to assume that you can't do the things that you might still be able to do.

15:28And you don't want to be put in what is still a bucket of, you know, and I hate using that expression, sorry, but it is a kind of category of people that I think somehow still feel like they are lesser. Not always, but that is still, I think, unfortunately, how we characterize disabled people. And, you know, as much of the narrative just this week, just yesterday, has been about, right, you know, we talk about disabled people in a clump, as though there's kind of one characteristic of disabled people, which is obviously completely nuts. We talk about, you know this complexity about you know will they work can they work you know from the horrible piece of you know they're just leeching off the state through to um you know the complexities around what might help people get it back into work so i think it is still a very complex characterization in terms of your own both physical and emotional rehabilitation how important was it in a sense to get back on the treadmill yeah treadmill felt quite far away at the beginning I think for me, it has always given me a real purpose working.

16:28I've loved it and I've been so lucky to do things that are relatively entrepreneurial. So I haven't had to go back into structures that were determined by other people. And I really recognize how difficult that must be if you're not in that fortunate position, because the single biggest thing, I guess, that shifted in my life from going able-bodied to disabled was flexibility, needing flexibility, flexibility and working patterns, working, you know, how you work, when you work. I work hard but it is in a different way to how other people work I'm very bad in the evenings I'm more in pain at night I don't really like going to networking events in the evening where I have to stand you know it's just those things and yet a lot of the world that I move in that's the kind of thing that you have to do so it's just reckoning with all those different shifts I guess but for me having a purpose is really important so this might be ridiculous but I decided to start a karaoke business I love lucky boys I was going to say my favorite business of all your Our business is Lucky Voice.

17:23So I was going to say, was that the first thing that you did post? It was. We kind of had the idea just pre the accident and my poor co-founders were going to begin like, oh God, here we go. What are we going to do? She's half dead in a hospital bed. But I remember Nick who co-founded the business with me bringing models of what Lucky Voice was going to look like as I could only lie flat. And I was looking at the layout completely high on diamorphine being totally unhelpful. But he would battle through that. Anyway, Lucky Voice is a relatively small business. We've just got a few venues around the country, mainly in London.

17:51But it brings so much joy to people like me. But it brings joy. And also, it really gives you a close track to what it is like to run a relatively small business in this country, particularly in hospitality and the challenges that people are facing right now. You know, I go around as president of the BCC and you talk to people, but having that actual experience right in your own working life is invaluable for me. and just seeing what the team are up against on a kind of weekly or monthly basis and what different changes in the economy mean for a business in hospitality is really interesting. So yeah, Lucky Voice was kind of the first thing that I tried to put my very addled brain behind.

18:29And then, you know, I just, I got so lucky because I guess some of the things that I'd always been interested in, you know, I do quite like the startup world, but what I really like is the impact of technology on society and broader institutional change that happens with technology. and so I was given the opportunity by Gordon Brown to think about that at a national level and that really did change everything for me because I began to think about just technology in a different way to how I thought about it before. Okay so just because this is important as somebody who worked in technology and then as you say Gordon Brown says tell me about it what was the big change in your thinking?

19:08Well, I guess I had always been slightly engaged in the startup world, the excitement of e-commerce, as you say, the bubble, the burst, all the stuff. But, you know, still a real believer in the change that was happening fundamentally to every single business because of digitization. But what I hadn't thought about so deeply was, therefore, what it meant for not only the broader economy, but people left behind. And that was the thing that Gordon Brown asked me particularly to focus on. and at that point so that was 2009 there were about 10 between 10 and 15 million adults who did not use the internet or didn't have access to it and of course mainly uh from more vulnerable groups or lower socioeconomic groups and that was a real issue in my opinion of social justice but also just economic help and clout because i think at that point and i'm not sure what the number is now but unfortunately i think it's pretty stubborn about a million people not in work not online but But at the same time, 99 % of jobs were only advertised online.

20:05So that's just a bit dumb because how are you meant to get back into work if you can't have the access to the internet to be able to find the work? So I became kind of a bit demonic about this issue and the digital divide in this country. Do you think the digital divide is obviously still with us to an extent, but do you think it is less pernicious than it was? Pernicious is a good word because I think it's still there. I think it changes and shifts. It doesn't kind of stop because now you know well and talk about a lot, the AI onslaught is going to give us a different kind of digital divide, in my opinion.

20:36And it is very pernicious for the people that don't have access. So I was chairing a committee in the Lords over COVID, looking at the long-term implications of COVID. And at that time, we discovered one of the strands of work we looked at was families who didn't have access to technology during COVID, two and a half million children who were sharing one device, often in a home with up to four or five children. I mean, so of course, then you've got a huge educational attainment gap for those children. So, you know, that is a few years ago, but it's still pernicious for the groups that are the most vulnerable.

21:08And that is a real problem. There is a digital inclusion plan. It came out about a month ago. Government is getting behind this in a way that has not been driven before. So, I mean, sorry, has been driven before, but not really in the recent history. So I'm confident change will happen, but it's really important to keep the focus on it because there's such an opportunity here. You know, imagine if we were a country, we're a small country, we could easily be a country that had more connectivity and didn't leave groups behind and then we just open up so many more possibilities to people I mean there is of course a paradox a rather painful paradox here which is many of us including me think that overexposure to smartphones yes for teens and younger children is harmful yes um therefore you know I think there is a very strong case for what they've done in Australia, which is to massively limit access for those under 16.

22:00But as you say, what you don't want is a generation of better off privileged kids, you know, simply being masters of these technologies that are going to be our economic future while, you know, large numbers of underprivileged kids are left behind. And we have to face the fact that a lot of people's homework has to be driven and done online now, and that's demanded by the schools. And, you know, taking kids out of the equation, which I know is a big part of it and I don't disagree with you at all and my friend Beban Kidron has done amazing work on this in the Lords you know that in my opinion that is a subsection of the bigger issue which is that we still have a huge number of adults not in work without access to technology stuck in that loop we also have you know older people again stuck in the loop I'm not trying to force them to do everything online but we know that connectivity can help can help when you're you know getting older or disabled and you you know doing shopping online being able to just make your life that bit easier.

22:56And sometimes I find it slightly dementing that people who are sitting there bashing me on their smartphones are saying, well, this isn't really an issue. I say, well, can you imagine if you didn't have access to some of the stuff that we now will take for granted? Martha, I hate to interrupt, but we've got to go to a quick break. Back in a minute.

23:14I wanted to take us back to something we started with, which is the availability of finance particularly for sort of younger growing entrepreneurial businesses we've talked about the difficulty that all women businesses have um actually you know one of the things that is a deep concern is we have hundreds and hundreds of absolutely brilliant technology businesses um not just digital some of them life sciences obviously across ai who really struggle to get the finance that would turn them from, you know, businesses with$25 million of turnover to businesses with billion, two billion, three billion dollars of turnover.

24:01And then it's also interesting to me because we've talked about the challenge of helping disabled people get not just remunerative, but also very satisfying work. the main thing the government is focusing on is how do you get employers to take a risk on disabled people but the other side of it and partly this is something that we can see from your life story you know maybe there should be well not maybe i think there should be more finance for disabled people who want to create businesses surely i completely agree you know it's well uh documented and you've talked about it on the podcast this scale-up gap that we face in this country.

24:42And it's very significant and could unlock so much growth if we were enabled businesses to get that pushed through that kind of 100 million revenue. It often is, I mean, sometimes smaller, but it is just becoming global or going for that big piece of investment or taking the next wave of risk, which we know is very, very hard in this country. And as you say, there are hundreds of businesses that have struggled to do that across every sector. You know, I hear it from the digital side, but I also hear it when I'm traveling around the country for the British Chambers of Commerce and talking to businesses who are stuck in that gap.

25:13And a subsection of that is I completely agree with you that there are people for whom starting a business would be a way of having some kind of flexible work in a way. And I absolutely guarantee you that if you just look at disabled people and as much as this is, again, you can't put it in one group of people, but we'll talk about it like slightly ineffectually, but that's how I would describe it now. Those people, I really believe, would work five times as hard on their businesses because they're already so resilient and tough in their life. You know, it's not easy being a disabled person. You have to think about so many more things than an able-bodied person does to survive in daily life.

25:49So those people, in my opinion, you should be betting on them because they are already shown that they can be tough. And if they're saying, and in addition, I want to start a business, I would be betting on that person. I mean, these are people who want to be winners and they've overcome incredible challenges. Exactly. But it's very hard. You know, I was at an event just last week talking to a bunch of disabled entrepreneurs and neurodiverse entrepreneurs. And some of the stories are heartbreaking. We have to be realistic that it's not very easy right now, full stop in British business landscape.

26:13And if you're facing any kind of challenge, it's even tougher. So I'm optimistic and dispirited in equal measure, if that makes any sense at all. But I mean, there are, though, some incredibly positive stories. A friend of mine, David Joseph, who used to run Universal, absolutely made a point because he just thought it would really help Universal, and I think it proved to be the case, of hiring neurodiverse people because he just recognised that these people, particularly when it came to creativity, had so much to offer. Yes, 100%. And Alex Mahon, a friend of mine who runs Channel 4, I'm sure many people will know, she's done an incredible job at putting disability at the heart of how she's thinking about Channel 4, but as an employer, as a brand, and as a content creator, you know, partly through the Paralympics and all of the stuff they did around that, but also as an employer.