SHE Inspiring Women 2008

SHE magazine announces first ever inspiring women awards

  SHE editor Sian Rees Results of the SHE Inspiring Women of the Year Awards 2008 were announced recently at a gala lunch at Claridges Hotel. Nominated by the SHE readers, the response to the first ever awards was truly staggering. Rread on for these inspiring women's stories …..

The Humanitarian: A woman who has shown unparalleled levels of selflessness to alleviate the suffering of, or contribute to, the wellbeing of those less fortunate.

The winner: Pam French

At 48, Pam has been married to her second husband Dave for nearly 20 years. She has six children of her own – Paul, 30, Matthew, 28, Katie, 24, Rachel, 23, Jamie, 21 and Daniel, 19, two stepchildren and an adopted daughter, Millie, 7. Not only that, over the past 14 years Pam has fostered more than 650 children.

“Eight years ago, a two-year-old girl came to us with a handprint across her face where she’d been hit so hard that you could count every finger on her skin. When people ask me why I open my home to waifs and strays, I say, ‘She’s why.’

All I ever wanted was children – lots of them! I’m the second eldest of seven children and loved being part of such a huge brood. After my parents divorced when I was a teenager, I brought up my younger siblings myself. I then married at 17 and, by the time I was 30, I had five children and a divorce under my belt. Yet the thought of single motherhood wasn’t daunting; my husband had focused on our business of running a pub, while I’d concentrated my efforts on our children. When we separated, we divided our assets accordingly – I took the children; he took the business. I wanted nothing more.

When I met Dave, he was very family-oriented, with two children and three stepchildren, whom he was bringing up alone. We had 10 children between us, but we still wanted to have a child together, so we were thrilled when Daniel was born. When he was about 14, my eldest son’s best friend kept running away from his foster home and coming to stay with us. When we asked his social worker if he could stay, we
were told we’d have to become registered foster carers first – so we did.

I felt strongly that I needed to know he was safe and I loved having him with us, loved the fact that we made him feel secure and that he thought of our house as home. When he left us at 18, Dave and I agreed that we wanted to offer our home to other children who needed looking after.

Fostering seems to come naturally to me. I’m patient, I know and understand children and I love them for themselves, unconditionally. The most I have fostered at any one time is 10, but the rules have changed and now we’re usually restricted to three. Some children stay only a night or two, while others remain for years. Three sisters came for a weekend when they were seven, six and 15 months – and they’re still here, 11 years later! There’s no magic formula – you just manage. We have three washing machines and three tumble driers, which are on almost constantly. My day starts at 6am and ends at 1am, as I like the house to be tidy before I go to bed.

There are no house rules as such. Instead,  we treat our foster children as we treat our own; there are no special favours. At Christmas no one gets more than anyone else and not one of my children has ever declared, ‘It’s not fair.’ I always have time for everyone – they all get a piece of me during the day. In many ways Dave and I have been brought closer by fostering – we share our experiences, the good times and the bad. We’re in this together, doing our best for the children – being a foster carer isn’t just a job, for us it’s a way of life.”  "

The Survivor: A woman who has triumphed in the face of extreme adversity, be it as a result of lifelong illness, a near fatal accident or exceptional circumstances.

The winner: Shy Keenan

Now 45, Shy was sexually abused from the age of four by her stepfather and his friends and associates. After testifying against her abusers when she was 38, Shy has built a new life for herself as a wife, mother and children’s campaigner.

“My mother had three children by three different men; she was married to my real father when she met a man called Stanley Claridge, who sexually abused me, my sisters and so many more besides from the moment he met us. The abuse carried on until my mother’s death when I was 14.

Just months after he came into my life, Stanley was having full sex with me and, by the time I was four, he was ‘selling’ me to his friends. When I was five, I told my mother he was abusing me, but she didn’t believe me and instead beat me while shrieking that ‘…I wasn’t going to steal her man from her’. From that moment, she never spoke to me again, and when I started primary school I was partially deaf and almost blind from her regular beatings. 

The abuse was so frequent that it became the norm. I tried to fight back, but Stanley started to drug me. I would fall asleep in my bed and wake up anywhere. Once I woke up in a field, almost naked, with a fractured skull and covered in blood. I could only conclude that Stanley must have sold me to his perverted friends again and once they’d finished with me, they had dumped me.

I felt a very deep loneliness when my mother died when I was 14. That same year Stanley was convicted of sexual abuse. He wrote to me while I was in care, including such vile and graphic details about sexually abusing me that the letters were turned over to the police. When he admitted abusing me, he was convicted yet, amazingly, sent home to live with my underage, unprotected sisters while I continued to live in care.  

Most people can’t believe these things happened. I attribute my survival to the fact that I refused to let  the horror of my childhood define me as an adult. I believe I survived because I put my faith in the few good people I met in my childhood. I finally escaped Stanley’s evil clutches when I was in my mid-teens and ran away to London. I had no contact with him or my family until eight years ago, when I made contact with my little sister. At that point we discovered that Stanley was still abusing children and was now targeting under twos. I realised I had a choice: to put a stop to the abuse once and for all, or to turn my back on those children, just as others had turned their backs on me. 

So my little sister and I set up a trap in which she talked to Stanley on the phone and he admitted everything, while I recorded it. However, the police failed to respond to the tape, so I took it to the BBC’s Newsnight and was invited to confront him on TV. Unaware of the camera, he admitted everything. As a result, he and two others were jailed for the sexual abuse of many boys and girls over the years.

After the convictions in 2002, I launched Phoenix Survivors (phoenixsurvivors.com), which provides support to people all over the world. I also work alongside the Government, police and child protection authorities. It’s a kind of justice that everything my evil childhood abusers did to me is being used to put a stop to their kind.”

The Champion

The winner: Dee Caffari

The first woman to sail single-handedly nonstop around the world the ‘wrong’ way against the prevailing winds and tides. Last year Dee, 34, ran her first London Marathon, raising £3,000 for the charity Sail 4 Cancer, and this autumn she will attempt to sail the 23,000-mile Vendée Globe – the only single-handed, nonstop round-the-world race.

“The sea is such an unpredictable force that there are always moments on board a boat when you’re not sure whether you’re going to make it. My most memorable came in 2006 when I was faced with a terrifying life-or-death situation, as I was battling the worst weather I’d ever experienced. I was gripping the top of the mast, trying to mend the sail as rain and wind lashed against me, but I was unable to move. My hands were numb, my legs had frozen and there was no one to call to for help. But just before panic set in, I managed to switch into autopilot and instead of trying to battle the weather and my predicament, I just clung on tightly for the next two hours until conditions improved and I could free myself and climb down.

My earliest memory is of lying in a bunk on my father’s motorboat. The cabin had a huge mirror covered in stickers from all the places we’d visited – so, for me, being at sea was synonymous with adventure from an early age. Even so, a life on the ocean wave wasn’t what I’d have predicted. As a child, I went to dance " lessons every night and was convinced I’d be a dancer or aerobics teacher. But you never know what opportunities life will throw at you – and how you respond is up to you. 

I didn’t learn to sail until I was at university in Leeds, studying for a degree in sports science. I’d gone from living in landlocked Hertfordshire to equally landlocked west Yorkshire, but as part of my course I had the option of majoring in outdoor activities and when I stepped into a dinghy for the first time it was the start of a lifelong love affair with sailing.

The hardest thing about what I do is the isolation. I’m a really sociable person and before I set sail around the world on my own I’d never even lived by myself. So spending 24 hours a day in total solitude for 178 days was emotionally crippling. I could exchange emails and chat on the satellite phone, but I missed non-verbal communication – the smiles and expressions of the people I love. It was only when I reached dry land again that I realised just how long it had been since I’d laughed.
I coped by writing a diary every night – it was my way of sharing my day. Music also provided company – my karaoke skills came on in leaps and bounds and I listened to things I’d never normally dream of listening to, from Eminem (which suited my mood when the weather was wild and stormy or I was feeling aggressive) to classical music that I found soothing.

Being at sea is all-absorbing, which makes it hard to maintain relationships and strike some sort of work/life balance. I’m lucky that Harry, my boyfriend, is on the sail team, so he understands the lifestyle – things would be almost impossible otherwise. I’m like a coiled spring both before and after an event, and during it I have a million things on my mind – Harry definitely drew the short straw, always having to deal with my tears and frustrations. But we’ve been together for six years now, so it’s a way of life we’ve both grown used to.

As I see it, I’m just a normal person who happens to have achieved something rather extraordinary. Nor do I claim to be supersonic or super-special – I was a PE teacher before I embarked on a full-time career in sailing. And I think people really identify with that because it just shows that if you put your mind to it, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.”

The Businesswoman: A woman who has shown unprecedented entrepreneurial spirit in her bid to achieve success in business or industry.

The winner: Penny Ferguson

Now 65, Penny was a 50-year-old mother of five when her third marriage disintegrated. Yet she summoned the strength to launch a highly successful personal development programme (pennyferguson.com) that enables people to become the best they can be. Her business now has a turnover of £1.6million.

“Until I was 50, I lived my life feeling unlucky – unlucky that my mother ran off with another man when I was a few months old, unlucky that I always chose the wrong men, unlucky that I had three financially ruinous marriages. I blamed external factors on how my life turned out... for my misery. It was only when I realised  it wasn’t the outside world that had to change, but me, that everything fell into place. 

My father was a wonderful man, but had no understanding of children. I was desperate for his approval, but it never came. So I left school with no qualifications and with a yearning to be loved. At 20 I married a man 16 years older than me. Our marriage started badly when he invited his ex-mistress on our honeymoon, but I was blind to his faults. We had three children in quick succession – James, Philip and Richard – but once I’d wised up to his abysmal behaviour, I divorced him. However,
I proved no better judge of character when I married the next man who came along – again desperate for approval. Three children later – Lucy, now 37, Emma, 36, and Mark, 35 – and that marriage also ended in divorce.

So at 33 I found myself a single mother of six. I’d never had a job – my father’s business success meant I wanted for nothing – but those two failed marriages had fleeced me of my £850,000 inheritance and I spent the next six years doing everything I could to support my children, from bar work to catering.

When I was 40, I met my third husband Denis, a charismatic training and development consultant. I worshipped him. But the more I learnt about the industry, the more I saw ways in which he could improve it – and I made the  mistake of telling him. He didn’t take kindly " to me voicing my opinions, and our marriage suffered as a result of it.
When I finally summoned the courage to leave him at the age of 50, I felt an excitement and freedom that I’d never had before – I’d lurched from relationship to relationship to find my salvation, but after I read You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay (Hay House, £9.99), I realised that salvation lay in myself.

It was then that I finally took responsibility for my life. I went on personal development courses and read every self-help book I could find. I’d often feel euphoric after a course, but then I’d quickly forget much of what I’d learnt, so I decided to devise one that overcame that problem. I ran my first two-day course from home, feeling very nervous, but at the end a client told me, ‘You’ve changed my life.’ From then, it mushroomed – in 12 years, more than 18,000 people have attended my courses.

I wouldn’t be where I am today had I not had the life I’ve had, so I have no regrets. I hope that starting a new life at 52 is an inspiration – it proves it’s never too late to begin again.”

The Innovator: A woman who has made a massive and/or groundbreaking impact in medical science/development at home or in developing countries.

The winner: Araxi Urrutia Obadachian

At 30, Araxi lives with her son Dario, 3, and her partner Humberto, who is also a scientist. She has carved out a successful career in the complex field of evolutionary human genomics, a male-dominated world of scientific research. She hopes that one day her research discoveries will prove invaluable to those involved in gene therapy – that is the insertion of genes into an individual’s cells to treat disease, by replacing a mutant gene with a functional one.

“Five years ago, just before completing my PhD at the University of Bath, I won an award from the Royal Institution and L’Oréal for the best science graduate of the year – and job offers poured in. I felt the world was my oyster and I accepted the offer of a research job to study the evolution of gene activity in Arizona.

Two years later, it was a different story. When  I became pregnant, I left Arizona and returned to the UK. Dario is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, better than any research paper I could publish or award I could win. But my confidence was shattered after his birth as I felt my days in science were over. I hadn’t worked for two years, and I wasn’t prepared to work full-time and miss out on Dario’s childhood, or to chase across the country after research posts.

It’s a real loss that only about eight per cent of university science professors and lecturers are women. This is because you have to spend your thirties undertaking short-term post-doctoral contracts - travelling for post to post, which is impossible if you want to have a family. 
But I feel very strongly that women can – and should – play a vital role in science, which is all about testing new ideas on how the world around us works. Women have a different way of thinking from men and approach things with a fresh, novel view. We should be nurturing that vital diversity and creativity, not disregarding it.

I eventually summoned up courage to visit my PhD supervisor in Bath and asked if I could work, unpaid, one day a week in the lab. He agreed and I achieved significant results in gene splicing, which had a real impact on my confidence.

Almost a year later, I applied for the L’Oréal UK Fellowships for Women in Science and was astonished to win one of the four awards for my research into how different types of DNA affect how our genes function. My research proved that genes are not ordered randomly as was previously thought, but rather that genes are sorted according to their levels of activity. I received £10,000 to help me advance my career – whether that meant paying for childcare or hiring a researcher to help me with my work. I can now afford childcare two days a week, which means I now work two days a week in the lab at Bath and one day at home.

Role models in science are so important. If young girls believe science is only in the male domain they’ll stay away. It’s vital to raise the profile of the few women scientists out there.” "

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