Ruth Sparkes, a 56-year-old tech entrepreneur, said she was spurred on after having AI “mansplained” to her by a younger man – on the same day she had built a chat bot for an app.
Sparkes created an app to enable sexual harassment to be reported in the workplace or in educational settings.
The former IT teacher, from Laughton en le Morthen near Rotherham, says she came up with the idea after discovering that girls in the college where she worked did not feel safe in communal areas.
“I got to this level of anger and was thinking, what can I do with my skill set? What can I do about it?” she says.
“Lots of people can build apps. You haven’t got to be a brain surgeon to do that, so that’s what I did.
“I taught myself how and the first thing I did was build a chat bot for the app.”
Asked if she has experienced any obstacles in the tech sector due to her age and being a woman, she says: “The day I built the bot was the same day I was effectively dismissed by a much younger man, trying to teach me about what a chat bot was.
“It made me so angry.”
Sparkes, who has an adult son, also says she fears her age counts against her when she applies for funding.
“It’s like, hey, I’m a woman on the wrong side of 50 and I’ve got white hair so just put me on the scrap heap.”
But Sparkes, who also runs a PR firm, has built two other apps and is working on another – involving knitting patterns – and says she has been approached by a business to build one for them.
“Who thinks they’re going to be doing that in their mid 50s? But my brain doesn’t work in the same way as it used to,” she says.