Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Lord Speaker’s Corner

Entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, is the latest guest on Lord Speaker’s Corner as she sounds the alarm over the deepening gender divide in tech.

Martha Lane Fox is Chancellor of The Open University, and President of the British Chambers of Commerce. In 1998 she co-founded Europe’s largest travel and leisure website, lastminute.com. From 2009-2013, she helped create the Government Digital Service and, in 2013, she joined the House of Lords as a Crossbench member.

Baroness Lane-Fox is a long-time advocate for women in technology, telling the Lord Speaker she had “seen no change in the relationship between the sector and women, or in numbers of women” in over 30 years.

She also gives a stark warning about entrenched sexism in the global tech sector, recounting how a CEO of a large company told her directly “We’re done with women” at a prominent US business event earlier this year.

Baroness Lane-Fox discusses the challenges of investment in the UK, explaining “we have a default in this country … (of) seeing the barriers to things as opposed to the opportunities.”

She also shares her opinion that the UK has an issue with scaling businesses, stating “We have the top three universities out of the top 10 in the world. We have amazing scientists, we have incredible inventors. But what we have is a stunning scaling gap, and experience gap … Only 10% of UK businesses even trade internationally. We are not very good at becoming big global businesses. So we need to keep having a push at the risk culture.”

Finally, Baroness Lane-Fox shares her take on regulating tech, smartphones for young people and even what her go-to karaoke song is. Find out more by watching or listening now.

See more from the series https://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/house-of-lords-podcast/

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