TED | 一位传奇女性的故事——斯蒂芬妮·雪莉夫人

演讲简介：2015 | Dame Stephanie Shirley是一位集绝妙的企业老板，伟大的母亲，慷慨的慈善家于一身的传奇女性。随时散发出优雅与幽默！在这个令人竖然起敬的TED演讲中，她向我们讲述了一段段令人敬佩和动容关于她的故事。

 

 

精彩演讲片段赏析

For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay.

多年以来，我是第一位也是唯一一个这样做的女性。在那个年代，我无法进行证券交易，我不能开公交或者驾驶飞机。而且，没有我丈夫的批准，我是不能开通银行账户的。我们那个时代的女性，要为工作的权利和薪酬平等的权利而抗争。

 

Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "Stephanie" to "Steve" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she.

没有人会对职场或社会中的女性有什么真正的期望，因为那时对女性所有的期望就是承担家庭责任，操持家务。我实在无法接受，所以我向这个社会习俗发起挑战，我甚至还在发展业务的信件上把名字由“斯蒂芬妮”改为“史蒂夫”，以便于在别人看出“他”其实是“她”之前， 敲开投资者的门。

 

My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. My interests were scientific, the market was commercial — things such as payroll, which I found rather boring.

我的公司叫Freelance Programmers （自由职业程序员），顾名思义，不能再寒酸了：创立于餐桌，注册资金仅相当于今天的100美金，——这些资金其实是来自我的劳动报酬、 和用房屋抵押借来的钱。我的兴趣是科学技术。可惜市场是商业化的——人们更关注工资单之类的东西，尽管我觉得那很无聊。

 

So I had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so.

因此我不得不在研发工作上做出让步。放弃那些吸引我的、充满智慧的挑战性课题，转而寻求客户所看重的商业价值：如货车时刻表，公交车时间编排，股票控制，许多许多的股票控制。最后，订单终于来了。我以固定的产品定价来掩盖公司设立在家中、员工都是兼职的这些事实，这样的做法在行业内也少见先例。

 

And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes.

有谁能想到协和超音速飞机上，进行飞行纪录的黑匣子程序，是出自一群在家中兼职的女性呢？

 

All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to ask job applicants, "Do you have access to a telephone?"

支撑我们完成这些的，只有一个简单的理念： “相信员工”，以及一台普通的电话机。我们甚至还问前来申请工作的人： “你家里有电话吗？”

 

An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. Our programmers — remember, only women, including gay and transgender —worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done.

我们早期的一个项目是开发一个管理控制协议的软件标准。 “软件”曾是，现也依然是极易失控、令人抓狂的东西，因此我们的那个项目价值连城。我们自己也采用了这套标准，持续多年对其进行有偿更新，最终，它被北约采用，作为标准。我们的程序员——记住，只有女性，包括同性恋和变性者——用铅笔在纸上画下那一幅幅流程图，定义每一项需要完成的任务。

 

And they then wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. All this, before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s.

然后她们写代码，通常是写机器代码，偶尔写二进制代码，这些代码通过邮件，被寄到数据中心，打在纸带或卡片上，（那时的程序是通过在纸带上的孔来让计算机读取的）反复打孔，确保无误。这一切都是远在近代电脑出现前的做法。这就是上世纪六十年代的早期编程方式。

 

In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have our pro-female policies. And as an example of unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. (Laughter)

1975年，公司创立后的第13年，英国通过了平等就业法规，只雇佣女性的做法成了违法的政策。因此，始料未及地，我们的“女性公司”，不得不让男人进来了。

 

When I started my company of women, the men said, "How interesting, because it only works because it's small." And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest." And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!"

当我创立我的女性公司时，男人们说“真有趣啊，它之所以没倒闭，只是因为公司太小了。” 后来，公司规模扩大了，他们说：“没错，规模是大了，但没有什么战略利益。” 再后来，当这个公司估值超过三十亿美金时，我们让70名员工变成了百万富翁，他们好像是这么说的：“干得好，史蒂夫！”

 

You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink.

你始终可以从头型来分辨出那些有野心的女人：她们的头顶很平，那是用来屈尊俯就让别人拍打的。 而且我们还有足够大的脚，足以走出厨房那一小块空间。