TED | Why do ambitious women have flat heads?- 斯蒂芬妮·雪莉，一位传奇女性的故事

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斯蒂芬妮·雪莉，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。

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=l018708f6wy&width=500&height=375&auto=0

Stephanie Shirley：Why do ambitious women have flat heads?

背景知识、演讲要点

When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. So let me tell you my story.

当我写回忆录时，出版人感到非常困惑。我的故事究竟是讲了一个童年时身为难民的经历？还是在上世纪六十年代创立高科技软件公司，上市后雇员发展到超过8500——的女强人？还是身为一个自闭症孩子的母亲？还是慷慨奉献大量财产的慈善家？好吧，事实上，这些全都是我。那么，就让我来给你们讲述我的故事吧。

All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. "What is England and why am I going there?"I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. 

一切都从我坐上一列前往维也纳的火车开始。这列火车是Kindertransport营救行动的一部分，从纳粹手中拯救了近万名犹太儿童。当时5岁的我，紧紧抓着9岁姐姐的手，对发生的事茫然无知。 "英国是什么？我为什么要去那？" 我能活下来，完全是因为很久很久之前，热心的陌生人帮助了我。

I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving.And then, I just got on with it. 

我很幸运。更幸运的是，后来我跟亲生父母重聚了。但不幸的是，后来就再也没有相聚过。但是，自我母亲把我送上火车起，这70年间，我做过的事情之多，远远超乎所想。我爱英国，这个接纳我的国家，这种热爱，或许只有那些丧失过人权的人，才可以感受到。我决定要度过有意义的一生，不能辜负救下我性命的人。而后，我确实做到了。

Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. 

让我们把思绪拉回到上世纪六十年代。为了对抗当时的性别歧视问题，作为英国软件行业第一批企业家之一，我创立了自己的软件公司。这同时也是一家只有女雇员，只为女性提供机会的早期社会企业。人们对此嗤之以鼻，因为在那时，软件是随硬件免费赠送的。

Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women.

没人会掏钱买软件，当然也不会从女人手里买。尽管那时的女性读过大学，有了像样的文凭，她们的职业道路上，依然充满了无形的壁障。我为冲破这些壁障不断努力，我想为职场女性创造机会。

I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. 

我招募那些拥有优秀职业技能却在婚后离开工作岗位的女性，还为那些准备生第一个孩子的女性提供可以在家里完成的工作。我们引领了“让暂离工作岗位的女性重返职场”的理念。我们是倡导各种新颖而灵活的商业模式的先锋：股票分红、利润分红，还有共同所有权——我把公司股权的四分之一交给员工，而这只减少了我个人的一些收入而已。

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。

Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said, "My husband's an angel," a woman complained — "You're lucky," she said, "mine's still alive." 

我来跟你们分享两个成功的秘密：让自己周围都是精英，和自己喜欢的人；然后谨慎、再谨慎地，挑选自己的搭档。因为有一天，当我说，”我的丈夫是个天使。“ 一个女人抱怨道——“你真幸运，”她说， “我的丈夫还活着。” 

If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler.

如果成功很容易，那我们都早成百万富翁了。但对我而言，我的成功是伴随着家庭的“创伤”的，甚至是“危机”。我老来得子。Giles，是我唯一的孩子，一个美丽的、令人心满意足的孩子。后来，两岁半的时候，就像童话故事里被仙女偷换了一样，他不再言语，变成了焦躁、不听话的小孩。

Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic and he never spoke again.Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. 

不是普通两岁小孩的那种“糟糕状态”，而是严重的自闭症，他再也没张口说过话。Giles是我为自闭症患者开创的第一所慈善机构的第一位入住者。后来，我前所未有地创立了专为自闭症儿童设立的特殊学校，以及医学研究慈善机构，也是专为自闭症患者设立的。

Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things and making new things happen. And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism.

因为每当我发现现有服务的不足，我就尽自己的力量去填补。我喜欢做新鲜的事，让创新成为现实。最近我刚为自闭症患者建立了三年智囊团服务。

And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet.

我的部分财富回馈到了我获取财富的行业，我还建立了牛津互联网研究院和其他的一些IT企业。牛津互联网研究院不仅仅关注技术，也关注互联网的社会、经济、法律和道德问题。

Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about getting lostbecause several charities would quickly come and find me. 

Giles在17年前突然去世了。我已经学会了没有他在身边，学会了生活在没有他需要的世界里。现在我的精力都放在了慈善事业上。走在路上我不必担心迷路，因为许多慈善机构都能快速地找到我。

It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment that borders on the obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else.

有一个创业的点子是一回事，但在座的很多人都知道，让这个点子变成现实是很难的，这需要巨大的精力投入，坚定的信念和决心，还有承担家庭问题的风险的勇气；还得每天24小时，一周7天的扑在自己痴迷的事业上。没错，我就是个工作狂。我相信，当我们以谦逊的心态做正确的事时，就能发现工作的美。“工作”不是那种 “我明明有别的更好的事可做，却不得不做”的事。

We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult.

生活需要向前看，我的这些经历教给了我什么？我学到了：明天永远不会像今天这样，当然也不可能像昨天那样。这让我能够适应一切变化，最终，切实地拥抱变化，尽管别人告诉过我，我是个不知满足的人。

Thank you very much.(Applause)

非常感谢你们。（掌声）

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