Ann Budge, the former Heart of Midlothian football club chair, spoke about how she overcame an autocratic male leader in Scottish & Newcastle Breweries when she started her career.
Speaking at an Edinburgh event to encourage more women leadership in tech, sponsored by Stellar Omada, the female entrepreneur and angel investor, who sold her company Newell & Budge to Sopra Group for a reported £30 million, spoke about her early days as a pioneering woman in technology.
Emily Walters, chief growth officer, hosted the session, introducing Colin Frame, the CEO of Stellar Omada, who announced that Ann Budge would be joining the Edinburgh-based tech company as a director. Stellar Omada are currently the main shirt sponsors for top-of-the-league team, Hearts.
“I have never found a glass ceiling, because I have never looked for one. Maybe it is there is some industries. Just because I was a woman did not mean I was any less capable of doing something. I used to say, ‘Don’t look for problems that might not be there,” said Ann Budge.
She explained how she began her career in 1970, armed with a degree in psychology and sociology, and worked at S&N, then a major Scottish brewing firm and now part of Heineken UK. She worked in the headquarters in Holyrood Road, now the site of the Scottish Parliament.
Budge was one of a graduate intake of 12, three were women, and she worked as a computer analyst for 11 years rising to a senior position within the brewery.
“At that point, there weren’t many courses anyone could take in IT, so there was a huge shortage of graduates with appropriate experience. They basically said we’ll take anybody with aptitude and we’ll retrain them,” she explained.
She left to work as an at-home coder for a women’s company. She then set up Newell & Budge, with Alison Newell, which they grew to become one of Scotland’s largest tech companies.
Budge explained how she drifted into the world of IT.
She told a tale of an unnamed senior leader within the brewing company who was ‘without question a male chauvinist’. Even the men in his management team were terrified of his power and bullying. At one point, he asked all departments heads to find headcount to lose. Ann Budge, who was unafraid of him, told him that she could not find anyone in her department that should be fired, because they were all excellent workers.
By sticking up for her team, she maintained they were all necessary. The bullying boss backed down and did not fire any of her team.
“None of us like this kind of management style. It is not entirely restricted to men … but it is about collaborative leadership style today and not just paying lip service to it. You have to follow through with leadership.”
She admitted she was now out of touch with much of the more modern technology that was being deployed, saying that the world that she lived in was known as IT.
Anne Budge spoke about the issue of many women ‘self-selecting’ themselves out of the tech industry because, even in the 1980s, there was an assumption that ‘girls would not be interested in careers in IT’. She said when the gaming industry bloomed it was with many male-orientated games involving shooting gun, fast cars and football.
She believes there is still an unconscious bias in the recruitment of women in technology roles. While a further issue is the retention of women when they do get into the industry. Her experience was women would come into the industry, be trained up, and work for five to six years, and then leave to either undertake family and childcare issues or find another job.
“There was really no way back for them, because the industry was changing at such a fast pace,” she said. This has been accelerated by the arrival of AI and machine-based learning.
In her advice to women who are climbing the ladder in the technology industry, she advised them to pick workplace battles that really mattered, and ‘ignore all the noise going on around them’. She urged young women not to look for problems that aren’t there.
“It is the big things that matter, so fight battles that are worth fighting and ignore some of the trivia. However. I know not everyone can do that.”
She highlighted the importance of having work teams with equal numbers of males and females. Stellar Omada‘s boss Colin Frame said he was proud of his company with the gender balance being nearly 50-50 men and women and he was delighted that Ann Budge has decided to join the board.
