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Dr Shima Barakat is a Research and Teaching Fellow in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at the Cambridge Judge Business School. She started her career as a construction engineer, which led to an interest in how organisations understand and act in relation to the natural environment and global issues, and ultimately to inspiring and supporting entrepreneurialism and business ‘not as usual’.

I have polarised parents. My mother is as risk averse as you can possibly get, whilst my father breaks all the rules. Actually, he doesn’t even acknowledge they exist and just goes about his life getting into a whole heap of trouble.

He’s an entrepreneur, so we’ve had our highs but we’ve also had bailiffs at the door. Unlike my father I’m aware of boundaries but I’m also very willing to question them. If I don’t think a rule is valid,
I’ll choose to either push back or go round it.

I think this attitude has helped me, particularly as a woman in engineering. I went to university when I was sixteen and was one of only three girls in a large class. ̽��ֱ��boys kept telling me I couldn’t do things because I was a girl and I got so fed up I told the professor I was thinking of quitting. His response was perfect: ‘You don’t strike me as a person who walks, so what else could you do?’ I decided to take charge, marched straight back to the boys and told them how things were going to be from now on. It was fine after that.

“My starting point is that I have the power to change something and I go from there.”

When I graduated I worked on the construction of the Cairo Metro; it was 400 men and me. I didn’t even have a toilet, so I commandeered the men’s when needed and put up a sign – ‘occupied for feminine use’. That’s illustrative of a broader mind-set, where if a situation doesn’t work, I’ll try to improve it. You don’t just sit there complaining and wallowing in your misery. My starting point is that I have the power to change something and I go from there.

I think I have the genes of a planner and I apply this to the chaos and uncertainty of the entrepreneurial world that I now work in. I get energy from making order out of mess. I realise that people don’t tend to deal well with chaos and that gives me an edge. At work we often get very short lead times for our programmes, so it can feel quite chaotic but I take real pleasure in making the whole system come together out of nothing.

It’s interesting that the belief I can shape and order the world sits alongside fears associated with imposter syndrome. I suspect I’m typical in that I don’t think of myself as a particularly successful woman. Most of the time I question whether I’ve done enough or if I’m at the level I should be for my age. I keep thinking I’m going to be found out and I imagine people reading this and asking ‘Why her?’

Despite this perfectionist streak, I also know I’m at my best when I’m involved in an interesting variety of things, rather than singularly focused on one. At university I was actually happy to come second; it was good enough and meant that I got to do so much more.

I like breadth and when I look at what impresses me in other people, it’s when they manage to strike a balance that enables them to spend time with their kids, fit in sports or a hobby and do good quality work at the same time. That roundedness is something that I value.

“Our systems are inconsistent and based on a masculine world view. We need to question them because they determine who gets recognised as successful.”

What I find frustrating in most workplaces is that success is often based on the sheer quantity of work. It’s often the person who puts in huge hours that makes it to professor early. Women tend to buy into the myth of the ‘good academic’ which emphasises citizenship, helping students, being on committees and so on. Then you see younger men who don’t collaborate, focus totally on their own research and make it to professor before they’re forty. Our systems are inconsistent and based on a masculine world view. We need to question them because they determine who gets recognised as successful. And it’s not just about women ‘leaning in’ more: that’s throwing the problem back on women when there are structural and organisational issues going on.

When thinking about gender, it’s interesting to step away from ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as categories and look instead at femininity and masculinity. There was a lot about me growing up that was very masculine. I’m dressed in pink now and I’ve gone through my career looking very much like a girl but the rest of me didn’t conform to standard notions of femininity. I made the Egyptian national team for taekwondo, had male friends and chose to study engineering. There is pressure to conform to stereotypes and they apply to men too.

We need to break down these stereotypes and there are some hints we are heading in the right direction. I had a lovely moment last week when two people Skyped in for a board meeting. I thought great: we’re getting away from this obsession with travelling to meetings just to be seen. ̽��ֱ��two people who dialled in were both men and one showed up with his baby. This is where we need to get to, the system needs to be family friendly for both men and women; it needs to be human friendly.