‘I thought the tech world would be full of new voices and people. It hasn’t happened. The number of women in the sector is tiny. It’s such a waste’

The founder of Lastminute.com, Martha Lane Fox, last week told the annual Wired technology conference how an industry that promised so much hope had failed. Here is her call for Britain to set a global standard for equality in the sector

You'll forgive me if I have to paint a bit of a picture for you. You can imagine me and my best friend aged 20, unbelievably dirty - head to toe filth - sitting on the edge of a dirt track in the middle of the Steppes, looking out across the Altai mountains as we tried to hitchhike from Ulan Bator in the middle of Mongolia to goodness knows where in the middle of Kyrgyzstan.

We were sitting on the edge of this track waiting to see if we could find another truck of people moving their yurts from one end of Mongolia to the other, to hitch a ride to cross the border. And we were fighting because we had a tiny piece of Mars bar left, and we needed it because all we had eaten for the last four months had been goats boiled in salty water and goats' milk curdled into a sour cream.

Continue reading...