Alumni Profiles: Jan Gooding (1978) and Paresh Patel (1981)

Jan Gooding

(Economics, 1978)

By Mark Walsh (English, 1997)

If you had only the bald statistics, Jan Gooding’s career would probably seem to describe a smooth arc of success. Childhood in the Bahamas. Economics at Cambridge. Stellar career in business. High-profile charity work.

That might be true for a man. For a woman, much less so. And for a gay woman, harder still. ‘It was a battle the whole way,’ says Gooding. ‘ A battle about being a woman and being taken seriously.’

Gooding matriculated at Girton the year before men were admitted to the College. It wasn’t, in her opinion, a particularly welcome change.

‘You cannot imagine how brilliant and bright the women were,’ she said, citing contemporaries such as Emma Thompson (who was at Newnham), Karen Pierce and Sandi Toksvig (at Girton). ‘I promise you, women were still fighting to get places at all. It wasn’t an anti-man thing, it was a pro-sisterhood thing. We were all hungry for our degrees.’

Gooding chose the College partly because it was women-only. She acknowledges that she was ‘not a straight-A student.’ Winning a place at Cambridge had been something of a family obsession: her uncle left his Cambridge university studies to become a pilot in World War II and was killed in a freak accident. Her mother, Gooding recalled, ‘always said to me that she wanted me to fulfil the dream of her brother.’ That had looked unlikely during Gooding’s childhood in the Bahamas. That is, until she was set a challenge before a test at school. ‘My mum said, ‘If you come top, you can have a puppy,’’ Gooding remembers. ‘Well, what do you know, I came top and nobody could get over it. Everyone was stunned, not least my mother. In place of getting a puppy, I was told I was going to take the exam to go to school in England.’

Arriving at Benenden, in Kent, a private school for girls, Gooding recalls, ‘I had never been in the cold before. I’d never seen winter. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I was so homesick and unhappy.’

But she stuck it out, and when the time came for university Gooding tried to maximise her chances by applying to Girton—her school had ties with the College—and by opting to study Economics, rare for a woman at the time. But the calculation almost backfired. She was interviewed by Frank Wilkinson (an Employment Economist who left school at 15 and had been a farm labourer) and, Gooding says, ‘His policy was to recruit mostly from state schools.’ ‘I didn’t know it,’ Gooding says, ‘but I’d given myself the worst possible chance.’ Wilkinson asked her to justify her private education and she told him that because her family had lived abroad and never paid British taxes, it had only been right that she had paid for her education.

‘I remember him smiling,’ she says. ‘Looking back on it, that was probably the moment I got my exhibition.’

After battling through school and university—her mother sadly died in her second year—Gooding headed for London after graduating in 1981. ‘I had this idea that I wanted to go into business,’ she said. An initial stint at a management training scheme with Selfridge’s didn’t go well, ‘It was really boring. Can you imagine a whole day on how to authorise a cheque?’ That was, until she rotated into the advertising section.

‘I was shown ads from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s in a wonderful old guard book that showed how the brand’s story had changed over time.’ The images hooked her. In 1989, at age 30, she earned a place on the board of an ad

agency called BWBC, having joined as an account manager four years earlier and worked up the ranks. She was the first, and only, female board member.

On paper, she was winning plaudits, earning success. In reality, the business field was another battleground. ‘I was so often the only woman in the room,’ she remembers. ‘I didn’t know that my gender was going to be such an issue,’ she adds, recalling having been made redundant while on maternity leave. ‘I really didn’t anticipate that.’

In 1997, Gooding co-founded her own brand communication consultancy, BLUEdOOR. Within two years, the company had Diageo and Unilever as clients and Gooding and her business partner Kathy Oldridge were earning considerably more than they had in their previous executive roles. ‘We had to own our own business to demonstrate that it was possible to have children, a balanced life and work at the highest level,’ she says.

After sixteen years of marriage, Gooding fell in love with a woman. It was the end of her marriage. She has said that speaking about her sexuality— particularly in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2014—is one of her proudest moments.

That interview was ‘a very, very big moment of authenticity,’ she told the website Incredible Women in 2015, the year she was ranked No.16 in the Outstanding in Business list by the Financial Times. ‘That was a big no-turning-back moment.’

Six years after co-founding BLUEdOOR, Gooding moved to BT as head of strategic communications, shifting from advising on marketing services to working for a corporate behemoth. ‘It was a culture shock.’ she says.

Gooding moved to Aviva in 2008, becoming group brand director. She helped turn the company, previously known as Norwich Union, into the most valuable insurance brand in Britain, but the lure of other opportunities— she was appointed Chair of the gay rights charity Stonewall in 2014—was strengthening, and she left in 2018 to pursue ‘a more plural career.’

A year later, Gooding received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the marketing website The Drum, an Honorary Fellowship from the Marketing Society and an Honorary Doctorate from Westminster University. ‘The combination of these three accolades in the same year, each representing such different parts of my career, was very touching.’

Gooding says she has no intention of slowing down as Chair of Stonewall. ‘My proudest achievements are yet to come, now I get to do what I want to do.’ She cites the defence of relationship education in primary schools as a particular challenge for the charity under her leadership.

‘Religious extremists can hold homophobic and transphobic views and they’re not representative of their religions,’ Gooding says. ‘We have to be careful it doesn’t turn into an antifaith thing. But we know there will be a battle.’

Gooding seems rather to relish the thought. ‘I want people to have a better time than I did,’ she says. ‘I believe strongly in the power of the individual. Everything starts with a person with an idea.’

Paresh Patel

(Engineering, 1981)

By Pippa Considine (Law/English, 1985)

Before interviewing Paresh I read about Paresh the highly respected Florida man of business and Paresh the champion of education, sponsor of Indian school meals and Girton bursaries. It was only five minutes before we spoke that I got a vision of Paresh the enthusiast. His WhatsApp picture is a selfie of Paresh dressed in a colourful shirt, his face lit up with a broad smile under the crumpled brim of a holiday fishing hat.

‘If you can, I want you to get across the message to the thousands of Girtonians out there to get them passionate and engaged, to get them involved in the call to arms.’

It isn’t a difficult request. Paresh’s own story, which he describes as ‘a charmed life,’ is an inspiration.

His family lived in India and Africa before moving to England from Kenya in 1973, alarmed by the despotic regime of Idi Amin in neighbouring Uganda. For immigrants living in London’s East End, life held its challenges.

At Brampton Manor Comprehensive, Paresh stood out. Very few of the pupils went on to university, so his count of 12 O levels was outstanding. His teachers fell over themselves to encourage him to stay for A levels. It wasn’t an easy decision for Paresh, he had already moved with his family to their new home in Florida. But he decided to return and finish his secondary education at Brampton Manor, staying nearby with his aunt.

With Cambridge on his UCCA form to study Engineering, he reckoned on a 10 per cent chance of getting in. So the invitation to interview at Girton was a surprise. ‘I didn’t own a suit and it seemed an incredible expense. I just borrowed a tie from a cousin who had two. Everyone else had a suit and going to dinner in College the night before, I was freaked out. At the interview I was so jittery that I started stammering and apologising. But the interviewer said, “Look at how I’m dressed” (he was wearing black corduroys and a turtle neck). “We want you for your mind and not for your wardrobe.”’

Paresh went up in 1981. He singles Girton out from other colleges for its progressive stance. ‘Girton has been a force for change. When it started, educating women was a fringe idea, now not educating women is a fringe idea. Over 150 years and countless lives, everyone pushing just a little bit has made this possible.’

After completing his degree, Paresh returned to the US and found the perfect job. ‘You know when you open up a TV set you see all the components and chips. I was always fascinated that somebody somewhere had put all those items there and I always wanted to be that guy.’ High-tech company Paradyne, based in Largo, Florida, gave him the chance to put all the components into a series of specialised ATMs and he flourished.

With his sought-after skill set, enthusiasm and can-do attitude, Paresh found himself in the dotcom boom, helping launch a tech start-up that went public in 1994 and, in 1998, he was brought in by telecoms company Global Crossing as a technical trouble-shooter. He was its 40th employee; in the two years that he spent with the company its work-force grew to 15,000.

In 2000 he was in the fortunate position of being able to take a career break. The move also proved serendipitous, as he side-stepped the dotcom crash. ‘I had no great foresight. I left because I was getting married.’

Six years later and Paresh was back in the thick of business, co-founding the Florida-based HCI Group, where he is now Chairman of the Board and CEO. ‘Insurance in Florida was in crisis at the time and we decided to start the company so that people could get property insurance.’ He drew directly on elements of his degree, namely operational research and game theory. ‘Courses you never thought would come in handy, but insurance rests on those sorts of things quite a bit.’

Paresh’s timing was once again charmed. HCI had nine years of insuring property in Florida without a hurricane. When the weather turned nasty, they were ready for it. ‘In that time we built a rock-steady organisation. We had four hurricanes in four years, but by the time they arrived we had good organisational systems and tools.

‘That’s one of the values of the Cambridge education—in times of adversity it sets you apart. In Engineering the professors had a rule that the smartest student should always have some work to do. They expected you to learn to prioritise, adapt and move on.’

Paresh supports education at two ends of the spectrum. He is committed to Akshaya Patra, an organisation set up to ensure that Indian schoolchildren have a healthy meal at school every day. ‘Struggling families send their kids to school because they get fed. It means that they will get a high school education and it could end poverty in a generation. Education gives the opportunity for people to leave their circumstances behind and that’s why I’m a big proponent of it at all levels.’

Paresh is on the Cambridge in America Board. He comes back to Girton at least once a year and has donated to the College to fund bursaries. He met one of the first recipients and discovered with delight that she had also been to Brampton Manor.

‘Our beloved University has stood resilient for 800 years and I have no doubt will continue to thrive for centuries. However, we can’t ignore the global hardships from COVID-19 and we should also be thinking about how to support our local communities beyond the walls of Cambridge.’

‘If every matriculating year at Girton gave a bursary—you’re talking about £87.5k collectively—with around 150 students in each year, that’s £500 here and there, imagine what that could mean to people like you and me, 150 years from now.’