“My message to anyone from a background where they weren’t brought up to succeed is, we can all do it.”

In non-Covid times how do you balance the distance?

I live in Surrey with my husband and a younger daughter who is 16. My three older children and five grandchildren all live in London. I have a flat in one of the colleges in Durham, so I stay up there some of the week. I have had a great time going to college dinners where you get to meet academics from different subjects and local people. Lots of people at Durham really care about giving back and widening participation. From the outside people might not realise that and I am very passionate about helping people who may not have had the best start in life. I realise how much work it takes to overcome that if you are not born into it.

I always felt I had a missing connection to the North East, I always wanted to live or work in the area because I wanted to find all this long-lost family. My Grandad is from Hartlepool with connections to Gateshead, Sunderland and Newcastle. Both his parents died in 1941 and he had seven brothers and sisters, but they all fell out when their parents died. I have now met one of my second cousins and we have become good friends, we go out for dinner in Newcastle.

Tech Mums is a brilliant concept – has it achieved what you had hoped it would?

It’s definitely a work in progress. What I wanted to do was reach millions of mums around the world – we haven’t quite got there yet! We have got to hundreds of mums around the UK, which is good. We have been hampered all along by lack of funding and it’s quite weird how the not for profit charity sector is perceived in the UK. It’s very difficult to make anything happen. There seems to be a mindset in the UK that charities profits should make no money at all. How do you do anything if you don’t pay anyone to do anything? Capital One committed to giving us some funding three years ago and they have helped us make a massive step-change in what we are doing. That’s been incredible. Without them, we’d be limping along not able to do very much.

Has your tech background meant that working from home during lockdown has been easy for you? Or are you as over video calls as everyone else?

Aside from really missing hugging my grandkids, I have loved it! I really love my pre-lockdown life and job; I travelled internationally; talked to interesting people; travelled up and down the country most weeks, I loved all of it. What I didn’t really have was much time to sit and think about things. I was always off somewhere whereas being in lockdown has been wonderful for that! I don’t have to rush for a train, and I can do a bit of gardening and chat to my husband and daughter and spend more time chatting to my kids in the week on Houseparty. We have got into our routine, my husband does the washing, I clean, my daughter cooks a lovely meal from scratch every night. She missed doing her GCSEs. When she first found out she was quite traumatised, she had a bit of a wobble about all of the things you look forward to. Then she started to realise she might actually do better in her GCSEs without doing the exams!

You’ve been described as a role model for women, who do you admire?

I really admire Dame Stephanie Shirley, one of the UK’s major tech pioneers – more than 50 years ago she had women, mainly mums, working from home, coding, writing top quality software like the Concorde back box flight recorder. That sounds like the future. She showed that could work all those years ago and yet most people in the UK don’t know who she is. I admire anyone championing diversity and championing women. Arlan Hamilton in the United States, who set up the Backstage Capital fund – she came from difficult circumstances. I always feel a kinship for people who have had a hard time then overcome it.

Do you think the message is getting through that people other than white men can create tech?

We are starting to realise now that we need diverse teams to create all sorts of things. If we don’t have diversity, then those products or services only serve that specific group of people. If we mainly have white males producing all the tech then it only meets their needs and in general not all of their needs – just a specific subset. If companies want to create products that are fit for purpose for all their users, they need diversity in who is creating and testing them. That’s obvious! It’s not rocket science. But why is it taking us so long for people to realise that? We are getting there in terms of companies who now want to hire diverse groups of people. I think some companies really get it and other people do it to tick boxes rather than understanding why it’s important. We are on the way there. But we’re not there yet.