Meet the dotcom millionaire who has bad things to say about the internet

That's quite a CV�...

At the age of 42, Martha Lane Fox has achieved a lot - most notably founding Lastminute.com during the online boom of the early 2000s. But, more than a decade later, there remains a problem in the technology sector: sexism.

Come to think of it, there are very few women in top tech jobs�

Precisely. A report last year found just 14 per cent of the top jobs in the IT industry go to women. And now the dot.com entrepreneur has spoken out about an "unconscious bias" against women, saying that while she had originally thought the internet would level the playing field, "all that's happened is that one bunch of very rich white men have transferred their money to another bunch of very rich white men".

What's the nub of the issue?

According to Baroness Lane-Fox, "the absence of women from the teams that are making the internet, the product designers, the coders, the engineers" risks sending the industry "back in time". The cross-bench peer, speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, said very often it came down to risk: "If you are a venture capitalist and you are looking at risk you are less likely to invest in someone that is not like you."

What went wrong?

She is not quite sure. "In the Sixties and Seventies there were a whole load of women in the computer industries but something happened in the Eighties that professionalised it and a lot left and it has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "I am perplexed by this as I genuinely thought the internet would be an empowering tool for women."

Is there a quick fix?

That's unlikely, but Baroness Lane-Fox, who is Chancellor of the Open University and almost died in a car crash in 2004, has plans for a Dot Everyone project, which aims to advance the understanding of the digital age. "I am optimistic because I think there are a lot of things that we can do that is imaginative to get women and girls into the sector right now."

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