The Tech Industry Forgot That Women Exist | Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon

0:00Hi, I'm Hayaatun and welcome to What We Don't Know, all about better leadership in a crazy uncertain world. How do you go from being a child prodigy to an advisor to governments? What does it feel like to crunch the numbers on countdown with that clock ticking? And how can we deliver more equitable outcomes from the march of technology? Well, I am so looking forward to exploring those questions and so many more with today's guest, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon. So here's what we know about Anne-Marie. She was a child prodigy in maths and computing, one of the youngest people to ever do A-level computing.

0:37She went on to study at Oxford and then had an amazing career spanning tech and entrepreneurship and social impact, public speaking, media work, advocacy and so much more. She also created the STEMettes, which is a social enterprise to try to support and inspire girls and young women to pursue careers in STEM. And through that work, she's already reached tens of thousands of women and girls in the UK and beyond. And alongside that, Anne-Marie has become a really prominent and respected voice on topics around diversity and inclusion and equity. and really importantly, the future of work, topics that actually have become part of our national conversation.

1:20And I'm really looking forward to hearing more about her thoughts on those. So let's go. Anne-Marie, welcome. I have a feeling you've got a naughty glint in your eye and I have a feeling that I'm going to have to behave here because you're going to lead me astray. Yeah, if at least one of us is behaving, then that's fine. That's good enough, right? I I hope you are sorry. Apologies for what you're about to say. Well, I don't think we should apologise yet. It might be fine. Who knows? I don't know. I'm not sure. It's genuinely a pleasure to have you here today. We can say the last time we saw each other, we were at number 10.

1:57Darling, darling. Yes, we were. And the time before. You're there all the time, obviously. I'm the landlord. um we usually start these kind of conversations by just finding out a bit about what our guests do at the moment and usually I kind of focus in on a particular job they have but in your case I cannot do that yes you are like the embodiment of multi-hyphenate it's quite hard to say multi-hyphenate careers even harder to do yeah yeah so can you give us an insight into you know what are you doing all day at marie and what are the different hats you wear what am i doing all day i run all day yes how long do we have i run all day so the main thing i do is run an organization called stemets which is girls young women young non-binary folk into stem and steam stem being science technology and doing maths steam being art and design as inclusion because that's where we believe is the true heart of innovation um and we go from five all the way up to 25 years old so that's what I spend the majority of my time technically three days a week I don't know if folks know this but three days a week if it's my contract I have with STEMMETs for my own organization um do you still have the job title head STEMMET I do yeah always the one and the only the one and yeah yeah exactly in the universe um I'm I'm head STEMMET so I do that the majority of my time I then do then it becomes murky on what the proportions really are right okay uh but Then I do a split of appearances and boards and speaking.

3:32No. Then I do a split. It's appearances and boards. God, this is really, this is hard. No. Then it's a split of appearances and boards. And boards is things like, I'm the DCIT Women in Tech Envoy. So I co-chair a task force. DCIT meaning the Department for Science and Innovation Technology. Yes. UK government. I chair the Institute for the Future of Work. I sit on Council of Research England. And I am a chancellor at Glasgow Caledonian University. So I have a number of different hats. That's like one of your days off, right? That's one of the days, yes, off from Stamets. And then the other days is appearances, which is kind of media, podcast, stage.

4:10This is definitely appearances, yes. Yeah, this is appearances. This is going in my time. I also time track, so this goes in my time tracker as appearances. Oh, that's interesting. But yeah, so that's stages, that's media, that's podcasting, that's TV. And actually, it is a really interesting question, how you work out, like what adds up to one career. What can you accommodate within one working week? So how do you know whether you can afford to take another role? Do you have some kind of formula behind it, you know, mathematically gifted as you are? Kind of, sort of, ish. Yeah, it's an art more than it is a science to balance them.

4:53just because to be to be honest i do one thing the one thing is i'm i'm amory that's the one word i used to describe myself well qualified for that but there you go yeah to be i mean there are other annemaries but whether they they do the annemaries who knows um the way that i balance it so i have a very sophisticated system called my assistant and we work things out and this is a genuine assistant this is a human being she's called angie shout out to angie and angie does the balance and we have a tug of war okay and we have a back and forth on there are so many things that are very anne-marie to do and there are only so many days in a week in a month so i actually track down to the number of working days in a month okay and i plan i plan a year advance then i plan a quarter then i plan a month then i plan a week then i plan a day and we make sure there's enough balance and when it looks like things are too many I either then start looking for what to cut or what to say no to which on the appearances side is easier than the boards and estimates um so yeah so I either cut or I just with abandon say yes to things I think are cool like today I'm like it's Hireton why would I go sit and chat with Hireton you may be telling me Angie didn't sanction this well thanks Angie I thought you were my friend she doesn't sanction 50 % of things that Angie sends to me are please just say no And it will always come into her because my inbox is on fire.

6:20And so I'm not very good with emails because there's so many things that come in. And so if you really want anything to get to me, send it to Angie. Top tip. But she will then send it back across and it comes in from Angie. So I'm like, oh God, this is, you know, I have to look at this. And I know she's chewed it and processed it. And then normally it is, for heaven's sake, say no. But there are such amazing and cool things that come in that I'm like, I wish I could be that. I wish I could do that. what's the cool stuff that you can't say yes to that you'd like to do it's just being cool places with cool people doing cool things yeah there's a lot of cool stuff there's a lot of government stuff i get asked to do yeah even now so one came in this morning they're like yeah we'd love you to shape x y and z and i'm like gosh i wish i could no no no i wish i could and then it's like well actually but someone else is going to get that role then you can't be like yeah i declined it Yeah, well, but also I want to be proud of what I'm doing.

7:13So I need to make sure I've got the room to do it. So that's the other reason that I end up then saying no to stuff. And since we're here, we're going to talk about other things, Steve. But I actually think what you're describing is something that lots of people are now encountering in their life. This idea of kind of linear careers where you start doing a thing and you have one job title. People say, what do you do? And you know exactly what to say. Like that's going to be less and less common. And there are already lots of us that sustain kind of multiple roles, you know, which hat are we wearing now?

7:39and in my mind I always think about it as a balanced equation you have to consider what the components are that add up to a kind of work-life existence that you enjoy yes so what are the things you're looking for when you look at that whole portfolio that whole kind of Anne-Marie pie what are the key components the key ingredients for you so I would say I have an I add an extra dimension so I have the work-life balance and then I also add legacy is a really big component for me yeah um and so with the work-life balance it is about so always with anything anyone asks me to do what's the time commitment like how many how many hours a week a month how many days a year are we talking because that's part of this this balance that i have is it something that's going to mean that fridays weekends are permanently committed to that in which case that's a definite no because i don't i don't work fridays i do but i don't work fridays and i don't work weekends i do but i don't okay um so i think that's part of it i think the other thing though for me is is this additive so a lot of the work that i'm doing with the government now relies on work i've done already with stemets and so then the amount of work i'm having to do it's not like i'm starting from first principles on i don't know understanding how heps in england work right and what even they are heps right tell our audience and gps is it something that already feeds into what i'm currently working on or is it something that's going to bring me more joy than what i have at the moment yeah and also is this something which is a legacy piece that actually in the whole of time and eternity this is something i have to do which was what the latest government role that i did accept was the envoy was i co-chair task force and work with the department for science innovation and technology on women in tech the proportions of women entering tech staying tech and leading tech and this is an 18 month which is also good because there's that time commitment piece.

9:29Working alongside the Secretary of State who has come up with this idea herself and is co-chairing the task force alongside me. So it's important to her. And so it's like, wow, in the whole of time and eternity, I've not had a minister be this serious about this and also say, hey, Amory, will you lead this with me? And so it was like, wow, as much as I actually don't have capacity for this, There's things I'm going to have to kick out in order to make this happen. Because if I don't do this, then what was the point of the last 13 years? And what will be the point of the next 30 years if I haven't taken this with two hands?

10:06Yeah, no, I totally get that. And it feels like there's something there around what's the alignment with Anne-Marie? Yes. And what's the ROI of your Anne-Marie-ness if I put it here rather than somewhere else? Exactly. Very cool. Right. Well, the next stop on the What We Don't Know tour is generally childhood. Now, this is unusual because most guests are like, oh, I'm going to learn lots that I didn't know. And I probably have a false sense of already knowing something about you. You're like, we've had this before. They already know. Let's fast forward. Just fast forward, folks. Fast forward over the next half of many minutes.

10:33We're not doing this. We're going to stop here. We're going to dwell here and we're going to learn something new here. So you're the first guest, I think, is routinely described as, or has routinely been described as a child prodigy. How do you feel about that title? And how did it come about? Oh, I don't know how it came. I was a child. I don't remember many of the things that came about. The child prodigy label for me now just feels funny because when you say child prodigy, people expect a child. And I've not been a child for quite a while now. I guess on accuracy grounds, I can understand that it does feel strange to still be called a child prodigy.

11:19but it's genuinely funny in the response so people literally I would show up in places and people expect like a Harry Potter oh my like the original it's a bit like the guy that plays Harry Potter I forget his name now Daniel Radcliffe he will show up in places yeah and yeah and he hates that people are like yeah like you're a man he's like you're a zombie man for me it's the same kind of thing and it's not that I hate it I just find it hilarious because then genuinely people are expecting a small person with glasses to show up. Yeah. To the point that sometimes they're disappointed. So I said this to someone that approached me.

11:57There was something they were doing on Hermione who, again, I'm actually not a Harry Potter fan. Apparently she's precocious or something and very smart and blah, blah, blah. That's right. And so on that premise, they were like, oh, we're doing this thing on Hermione. There's a new show or West End show or whatever it was. We'd love to talk to you about being a real life Hermione. And I was like, great. Okay. so we get on the phone she's like so you were precocious and I was like no I wasn't precocious and I didn't like do it and I actually didn't like reading and I didn't and I didn't and in the end they're like okay we're gonna go with somebody else we're gonna go now go and scramble and find so what's funny about the childhood the child prodigy thing is folks have such a clear concrete image of what that looks like and then I show up yeah so we're all projecting something onto you that is completely irrelevant to the actual childhood you had so put us straight amory but also the fact that i'm not i'm no longer still a child i didn't wear glasses i wasn't precocious in fact i was the class clown and that was how they discovered my child prodigyness it was for goodness sake amory there were 30 in the class and so when i'm teaching or when we set the exercise for everybody you have to not distract them right by telling jokes so it was you were bored essentially i was bored yeah i was really really fortunate though that they saw it as boredom, not a behaviour problem.

13:16Yes. Which I'm very, very aware as a little black girl in East London. Yeah. Showing up in those classrooms and being disruptive. There are other conclusions that they could have drawn. And presumably your parents were key to the response to that observation that you were not being stimulated by what you were getting in class. Yes. And so as a parent and it was a teacher, as a particular guy who, almost every day now, anytime I'm doing an appearance, I feel like we talk about Mr. Davies. Mr. Davies. From St. Davies in the 90s. We don't know where Mr. Davies is. We've tried really hard to try and find him.

13:45But someone like that saying, hey, she's bouncing off the walls. I actually need to teach the other kids. But I've heard this thing where they do accelerated education for certain kids on particular subjects. So if you guys are okay with it, I'm happy to give a slightly higher maths so that I can focus on teaching everybody else. And so that was where it started, which my parents were like, okay, cool. Like that sounds cool. That sounds interesting. That sounds like something that, yeah, okay. fine if that if that's going to work then we will lean into this we'll nourish this her doing education is good yeah and her doing more education is great yeah and even more so if you've said it you know it's not because everybody thinks their child's a genius yes um and so i was really fortunate in that that was what it was so then that meant that by yeah six i'd done the two gcse's one in math and one in ict um which was hilarious for me as well So I'd say this, I said this time and time again.

14:43I didn't write it thinking, God, yeah, I'm going to pass this. I wrote it thinking, wow, okay, cool. This is like new stuff that I've learned. And these quadratic equations are kind of cool. Circle theorems, not so much. The stats are great. I'll sit and do this paper. ICT as well is still brilliant. I still love the tech, as we know, as we can see. And so I wrote those papers and didn't think anything of it. And at that age, you don't know what to expect, do you? You don't have any condition to think, oh, this is an exam, I feel a certain way. And your parents managed to not create that feeling of pressure or expectation around that.

15:20Which my parents have been excellent at, are excellent at. And also, I think I met them partway on that because I also have very, I don't have any expectations of most things that I do and engage in in life. Some would say is a bit of a weakness of mine, but, you know, some would say is a strength. But it was great because then you write uninhibited. And if I'd have failed the exams, a 10-year-old failed these, like that's not news. That was the whole point. So then the pressure in the biggest sense was off. And so, yeah, when the results came back, it was like, wow, really? Okay. I wonder if they knew that a 10-year-old had written that.

15:58But also, what? I'm getting to go to McDonald's. What? No washing up for a week? More exams. Give me more exams. who knows what else I might get from sitting down and doing these papers. And then the A-level on computing was the one that then came next. So yeah, this child prodigy thing. And remind us how old you were. 11. But this child prodigy thing. So for me now, it's quite funny because it's funny because, yeah, people are expecting a child to show up. But it's also funny, weird, because I'm also now running STEMETS, super aware that I was really fortunate in that that was seen like I said not as a behavioral problem yeah but then I was given the opportunity yeah and we say this you hear it all the time right talent is evenly distributed opportunity is not and it's so clear to me now I'm running STEMET and doing the programs we run things called certification academies every half term apart from the exam mom because then they're actually doing exams um and it's so clear to me and it's so and Literally, I was with two of our students yesterday at GCHQ for a thing that was going on there.

17:02That was half secret, half not, which was really funny kind of talking them through, you know, what that meant when they were like, don't, you know, don't say any of this outside the room. But it's, it was, it's real certifications with real certification providers like QA, like the Open University, that we are allowing these teenagers to write without saying, have you passed this GCH? Can you do this test? Do you think you're smart? No. are you available for the half term can you make it to this building even if you can't make it to the building we'll probably pay for your train ticket yeah and we will probably send you a laptop as well for do you know to do the do the you know the project work in python or whatever it might be they get these real certifications and there's not as much fanfare because they've done it as as a group of eight or ten or twelve of them over a half term they've got the agile they've got the python they've got the cyber they've got the data they've got the ai yeah but it's normalized and you know this sort of relationship with um these moments of high intensity high pressure i think have created in some people's minds a negative association with doing exams or passing things that give you credentials yes and i guess this is sort of the antidote that you just make it a thing you do in a supportive environment great when you get it and if it doesn't work out no problem yeah you'd be on to the next you do the next one and so i i definitely saw the difference when i then came to year 11 and i had a bit of a like year 11 for me wasn't really i in the end i did i had seven gcses that i decided to do in year 11 a couple of as modules or a two a level modules as well because you you'd have thought you can't go to university with two gcses and an a level um and you need english in this country at least so i already had maths but there you go um but it's so it's so interesting how then even then all my mates were still you know stressing out and i was like well a lot of this is optional a lot of this i'm just doing because yeah you know i'm i'm what i'm the eldest of five and we can't all uproot and go to oxford this year because amory you know didn't want to be bored in her classroom um and so i'm super super aware now and it's why i do so much of what i do that this is about opportunities about giving people opportunity because who knows what other geniuses yeah gene i whatever you you You know, who knows who else, given those opportunities, could do transformative things.

19:22That because of the way the system works at the moment and, you know, all the other things that we know are kind of bad in the world, those things don't happen. So you've got this kind of maybe innate sense of agency when you're talking about how you navigate a child and things. You're talking about it in a way that is considerate of other people. But, you know, sounds like you had clarity in your own head about the decisions that you were taking from quite a young age. whereas lots of people are kind of consumers of the education system without feeling they have choices. And you've talked about how you weren't doing this because there was this desire for you to be held up as a child genius or something.

19:57But at the same time, when you have these real outlier achievements, expectations are created in other people and sometimes in yourself. So when you looked ahead at kind of career, were you able to just sort of feel as free about that as you sound when you're talking about those kind of early childhood years? Yes. At 13 in the same school, or in the secondary school, so there used to be this thing called Connections, which was like our careers advice. Oh, your National Careers Advice Service. Yeah. I think we were two young. I don't remember careers advice very much. They'd give you a card. Connections was great with two Xs.

20:36It was absolutely great. They'd give you a card, you'd get like money off in Topshop or whatever on the weekend. It was absolutely brilliant. there was a survey that we had to do once oh yes oh no i did yeah now it's come back to me i don't think it's called connections but it's come back to me keep going and in that survey it was you know do you want to work outside no do you want to work with dogs yeah it was that kind of stuff do you like maths yeah um and at the end it was okay you should be a systems analyst or a management consultant i think management consultant might have been a head of systems analyst um and this was great because it didn't just say here's your life like print it out on a receipt go and you know check that in somewhere it was like okay cool here's like a dossier on what management consultants do how much they're paid all that kind of stuff um and i remember reading it and thinking okay cool this is a hundred thousand pounds as a salary that is great that's a great number i'd love a hundred thousand pounds as a salary first off secondly if what you've written here is to be understood then i could be a management consultant for sainsbury's and it was since it was sainsbury's i don't know why but since it was sainsbury's it's like i could be a management consultant for Sainsbury's and then I'd help them out and then that would mean that I didn't need to pay for my groceries which would mean that the hundred thousand would stretch even further and so that at 13 I was like I'm gonna be a management consultant Sainsbury's is gonna be the client and then the same dossier which now I don't know if it would happen I don't think they'd be allowed to do this on the same dossier they then said you're much more likely to become a management consultant if you have an oxford university degree and they had i remember they they had a woman who'd done chemistry yeah who'd gone to who'd done chemistry oxford who was now she was a case study who'd now and and i remember you know chemistry like chemistry they're not you're not consulting on chemistry whatever so i was like brilliant so whatever i do oxford so at one point i was gonna do french oxford but i was like whatever i do oxford it's fine because then i'll be the management consultant because it means to an end right and so that was it at 13 by 16 I changed my mind ever so slightly.

22:33Okay. Because I'd done it. Sainsbury's was no longer so important in your life? Well, basically, so I didn't know about investment banking because I wasn't on the list. Okay. But by 16, when the Windsor Fellowship, shout out to them, I'd done a work experience at Deutsche Bank. Okay. And so then I was like, oh, okay. So, these guys do this whole money thing. 100 ,000 is a big number, but I guess it would be bigger because what do you, how much do you spend on things in Sainsbury's versus how much they spend things. And so at 16, I was like, I'll be a manager. And so every three years, probably still till now, I changed my mind completely because the world opens up.

23:07Things change. And I'm like, I didn't know. At one point, so at one point, and then we should stop this line of stories. At one point, I ended up being invited to, gosh, it was like a launch of something at Shoreditch House. Yeah. The Members Club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember going to this building thinking, gosh, what is this? and I'm an East Londoner so I'd have gone past this a hundred times in my life because Deutsche was also around the corner so I'd have seen this building but never known what was in there and got in and was like wow did a bit of reason I was like who knew members clubs were a thing so then for that three years I was going to launch a members club wow okay I feel like I could subliminally plant the seed for the next chapter of your career why not I'm open if I was thinking hard enough yeah do you know what I mainly think is I really didn't have the quality of careers advice you had and it was wasted on me do you know what mine was what was yours forensic scientist fashion designer and then international relations not too late for any of those international relations you're probably closest to as kind of attainable career goals yeah they were odd I'm going to say and quite eclectic I think I was confused because you're eclectic this is it multi-hyphenate that's the joy of work this is what we're talking about now this is the joy of work everyone's upskilling reskilling I know it's this whole thing of what do you want to be when you grow up you know the AI is not going to yeah exactly the AI is not going to fashion design for all of us I have lots to get through and I've got one more.

24:29I'm going to give you a little, take you back in a memory lane. Okay. So you give your STEMETs fantastic experiences in STEM, but you must have gone on school trips and stuff like that. What's your most memorable school trip? Oh God. Not for the same reasons. And we don't, this doesn't happen on STEMETs school trips, by the way. I'll make sure this trauma never happens to anyone else that's in my care. Okay, so we'll just do the health and safety notice. Thank you. we in school in secondary school this could have been year 8 could have been year 9 I think it was a geography school trip exactly so yeah 12 or 13 probably not 14 years old little Anne-Marie not grey hair wearing blue uniform I hated my uniform when I go into schools I always include a photo of me in my secondary school uniform and it's specifically and the teacher's always looking at me like what is she talking about it's specific specifically because i had to wear a kilt every single day to school i wore a kilt in east london every day to school i wore a kilt that's with stripy white and i always i hated that school uniform and i and i showed it to the kids i'm like just in case you hate your school uniform firstly you're not on your own but secondly there will come a time in your life where you don't even have a kilt in the house okay all right um anyway i'm sat there in a kilt at uh the greenwich observatory greenwich meantime observatory classic southeast london yeah not that far for us on a school trip um and for some reason so we'd gone around the whole thing yeah time blah blah blah time zone latitude longitude um and then it's lunchtime and we've got packed lunches and for some reason i don't know maybe there's too many of us maybe the weather was just so nice who knows we have lunch outside so we're sat on the hill there's a huge hill um just outside it that kind of then goes down to the where they did the horses things for the olympics so sat up on the hill and we're sat in a circle cross-legged on the floor eating our sandwiches yep and we're kind of just chilling chatting teenage girls about all the things that are very important in life yes i i can just imagine and um i then look i feel this this sense this rumbling coming up in my body like and i look up from my sandwich or whatever i was eating and i see a huge dog galloping towards me from across and bear in mind the park is huge so it's quite a distance but it's coming straight at me i don't know what i had in my sandwich dog food who knows right so this dog is galloping towards me and you have fight or flight and i just had freeze oh no no i didn't learn about that one in biology i wish they had are you sure you weren't preparing to fight i don't know what i definitely didn't fight so all my friends flights flight was their response and you were just some left their lunch others took their lunch whatever and i just i froze in the moment and i was stuck there please tell us it was all right and the dog the dog didn't maul me or anything it was the galloping and it was the excitedness and then it just bounded all over me lick you or something didn't it the sandwich Which, either way, since then, dogs have not been...

27:40I mean, I guess I maybe don't mind them now. Well, I was once... This has gone down in family folklore. I was once chased into the duck pond in Hyde Park by a goose. And I still feel the humiliation. Have you been back to Hyde Park? Many times, but I don't trust geese and I never will. No, I don't think geese are an animal that needs to be trusted. All right, well, we've done the animal story, so our producers will be happy. Okay, we're going to get back on track. um so let's let's fast forward into your kind of career itself um how did you first experience leadership you know when you think about what was the first time you thought oh i'm i'm interested in leadership or i mean i have a responsibility that i can associate with being a leader so the very there are two two initial times that come to mind the first one was um there is a fantastic woman called Sonia Meggie.

28:32Sonia Meggie. Who now works at Bloomberg. Is this a necessary detail? Where did you encounter her? I don't even know where I encountered her. That's a great question. I have no idea where I encountered her. She's just one of those people that everybody knows and we don't really know why. And she ran an organisation, ran an organisation called Inspirational You. And someone connected her with me and I genuinely can't, all I know is I should remember her, meeting her for a sit down in the lobby at the Hilton on Bankside. Ah, okay. And she was like, I'm running this organisation and I'm trying to pull together an advisory board and I'd love you to be on it.

29:07And I was like, really? Me? How old are you then? And I must have been early career. I don't know, 20? Maybe 21? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not old at all. And I was thinking, wow, okay, me? She's like, yeah, for everything you've done, education, kids. I was like, okay, sure. I don't know what this will do, but okay, I'll give, I'll give, it's just advice. Yeah. Right? how hard can this go? And it's not only my advice. I was like, it's not just me that's on your advice. And I think there were 15 of us. So I got to see the inner workings of a board and it was an informal one. It's not that we were trustees or anything like that.

29:42Which is a lovely place to practice having a bit more responsibility. Exactly, exactly. So I think that's maybe one story that I remember. The second one was having been on Sonia's board and this is why it's important to give folks opportunities and to be open to the possibilities, right? Especially if you're someone that has the agency to be able to do that yeah um I was then working full-time on a graduate scheme at a bank and um there was a program that then came up that said that was um young business in the community I think it was but they used to be called arts arts and business I think was their kind of pre okay I don't remember um but they were running a program called young professionals on arts boards okay um and so i remember as a grad and it came through to us because we were grads so they were specifically looking for young people on on to join arts boards and i thought okay cool let's come through to me a grad at a bank an arts board is quite different from the normal space that i'd be on but i'm a young professional and so i've done that they'll do the training in fact i think this is where i got to see shawditch house actually now i remember how i got there um did the training and then they matched me up with a music charity in east london called ud music which i'm now the chair isn't that a cool story i know right and so that's like 13 years later so now you can tell that i'm young plus 13 forever young you'll always be a child

31:05um and so it was really interesting because then i got to understand trustee shit and governance and charity governance in a way that was maybe a little bit different from the corporate governance the steering committees and all those things that I got to see and prepare docs for but never really sat in in the organization that I was working in and so that that I would say those are my kind of two earliest memories of leadership in that kind of way. That is so interesting and I think you know you've really hit on something there around getting an insight into how decision-making entities actually work in practice and doing doing that at a time when you can genuinely contribute but you don't feel the pressure of having to take total responsibility for everything that's being done exactly and it is a privilege when you get inside those rooms and lots of people maybe don't even know they exist and that there are routes into them yes so we're hoping in a this this is a a little bit of um kind of sneak preview we're hoping to do a special series that will help people work out how do they get into these kinds of opportunities when someone doesn't opened the door for them.

32:09Yes. So amazing. Really, really fascinating. And then you had a successful career and kind of consult after banking, you've worked in tech and variety of things. What would you say is the next kind of big leadership threshold you crossed? Oh, that's a good question.

32:35the next big leadership threshold

32:41could have been starting STEMETS and did you could have been starting so I I was I was I went on a bit of an interesting entrepreneurship journey so I've always known I've wanted to run a business a commercial business mind you which I'm not doing at the moment I've always known I've wanted to run a commercial business since I was at uni so that was one of the iterate like I kind of you know went on these every three years kind of changed course and I started Stamets kind of reluctantly and maybe half-heartedly. Because you couldn't find anything else out there that was doing this? Yeah, it was a New Year's resolution.

33:22You know, all the best things are... Not go to the gym. Exactly. Other people started yoga in 2013. Ginger shot each morning. Yeah, this is it. And I started Stamets in 2013. I started the Stimets project, in fact. I didn't even think. It was sort of accidental social experiment. It was like, okay, I'm going to give this, like maybe there's something in this. So I blogged for a while internally at my company and then I started externally, which is another good thing as well that folks should, if you're looking for kind of tips, early career rather than later career, but where you can experiment, look for spaces you can experiment on thing in places because there's so many skills that end up being transferable that it was so much easier for me to blog internally.

33:58And my first blog would have been like 30 words and by the end it was maybe a thousand words. And I did it because I hated writing, but writing is a really important skill to have. And I did a maths and computer science degree. So you can imagine how much writing there was in that. Not much, you know, for the listener. And so I ended up blogging in a big way. And there was a particular event that I went to, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, that I ended up blogging quite a lot about the things that I noticed there, things that I spotted. And then one of my blogs, I kind of posed it and I was like, yeah, actually, maybe I could be the person that does this.

34:32actually it turns out having gone to this conference and reflected on this that this is an important problem that needs to be solved and maybe there's an experiment to be done or a project to be run to see if you bring food fun and freeness along to it and we don't look at stem as something that happens at school and then forget that everything that happens in life here like instagram was the biggest one like i remember just being obsessed with these kids are on instagram all day every day yeah this is this new app and this was like the days when you just it wasn't contrived and using ai like all it was just i remember it what you had for lunch or you you know the cello you know whatever the innocent days right heady heady innocent days of instagram um and so i was like it's weird it's weird that these people are doing stem things for girls but they're not talking about instagram like how is that how we how are you how are you doing how is that possible um and so started stemets and tried to bundle up a load of things where i was like hey as a teenage girl now this is what they're interested in and it is already stem so just talk about that and that you'd have them um and so started the stemets project i also was a young person then as we've established and as a young person i was saying this is one of our summits yesterday people give you money to try things because you know why not right this is the time for you to experiment um and so star system metz with 300 pounds from o2 because i was a young person and this premise that yeah if we had a load of food and a load of fun and people that looked relevant to our young people and for our listeners give us a scale of you know from 300 pounds and an idea where are you now a million 1.2 million maybe a year ish but you know other other donations and other money that fix my hat on the back of the sofa would be well appreciated um or not even down the sofa you know wherever you keep your cash um and so and so it was it was a project though it was i'm just going to give this a go because i have a job and i am in industry and i really enjoy my job and i'm paid really well to do my job um and then it was only by the end of the year we got called into number 10 Michael Gove was the then minister David Willits was the then universities minister yeah we were called the insurgents it was me science girl and maybe little miss geek who were called the insurgents amongst others and they were talking about quite a few of the crises that we have around STEM and girls I was like wow okay this is like this is 10 months in that's mad I've made it to number 10 10 months in on just my New Year's resolution careful what you decide for next New Year's resolution I'm like not doing that again Not doing that again.

37:14Not on New Year's resolution since. But then was also like, hey, I haven't slept this year. And sleep is important. We like sleep on what we don't know. We talk about it a lot. It's the most... Have you talked about magnesium? Folks taking magnesium to sleep? Feel free to add to the sleep theme. I mean, it's not a medical recommendation and other minerals are available. But if you're struggling to sleep, magnesium, just pop some magnesium before you go to bed. You have many. So with STEMET, so I was going to quit. I was going to close it. And I said that to a couple of folks and they said, no, you can't.

37:49I was like, well, okay, but I also have to sleep. So someone has to pay somebody to run around and organise these events. And then that was, you know, the beginning of, again, testing a new social enterprise model. So it's amazing that you've done that and you are contributing to systems change by opening up that opportunity door and empowering these talented young women to go out and be successful and make change happen. But I know you, Anne-Marie, and you are somebody who is ambitious for change. Yes. So when we step back and look at where we are, we're not done yet, are we? Far from it. So what are the changes in the world that you feel we need to be working harder at, working smarter at, What is it you'd like people listening to think about more than they may be otherwise thinking about?