‘Tech isn’t just for geeks’: Amy Golding on why women don’t need a science degree to be successful

View From The Top: The 33-year-old is the youngest CEO of a $100m company

’I always loved English at school, and I didn’t like maths and science’ (Abi Galatia)

“The future is being built by white guys with a science degree,” says Amy Golding, bleakly. Fortunately the 33-year-old CEO of Opus Talent Solutions has a plan to change all that. And, refreshingly, the answer is not to dragoon more schoolgirls into getting science degrees.

Golding herself, although now fluent in tech, doesn’t have one. Her mother is a teacher and her father is a freelance journalist and she was brought up in Greenwich on words rather than numbers and binary code. “I always loved English at school, and I didn’t like maths and science.”

But even as a kid, she says, “I wanted to earn money and be useful”. Her varied CV includes car washing aged 7. At the age of eight she came up with the idea of hand-made magazines, where she wrote all the articles and did the horoscope and the crossword puzzle (which never worked). “It was a terrible business model”, she says now, sitting in the sun outside the South Place Hotel, a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street station. “It would take me hours and I’d sell them for 20p.”