What a remarkable woman

 

Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley. I'd never heard of her. But what a remarkable woman. What a remarkable life.

After a brief illness, Shirley died in August at the age of 91 in Reading, England. But she didn't start out in England. She was born Vera Buchthal in 1933 in Germany, 

the daughter of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. Her father having lost his position as a judge once the Nazi's took over, Vera's family moved to Austria, where her mother was from.

Once Hitler took Austria over in 1938, that country was no longer a safe place to be. Vera's father made his escape to Switzerland, hiking a la the Von Trapps of Sound of Music fame, over the mountains. Shortly after, Vera and her sister were put on the train by their mother and became part of a Kindertransport to London, a program that saved thousands of Jewish children from the death at the hands of the Nazis. 

The family was eventually reunited in England, but Vera had developed a strong bond with the foster parents who took her in. When she became a British citizen in the early 1950's, she changed her name to Stephanie Brook. And began working in tech for the post office, where she worked on the development of telephone exchanges and a lottery-number generator. (As an aside, the girls' high school she attended didn't offer math, but she was allowed to take math courses at a local boys' school. She opted out of going direct to uni, because the only STEM option open to her at the time was botany. She eventually got her degree by taking courses at night.)

After the PO, Shirley moved on to a small tech company, working on computer design.

But she found herself bumping against a glass ceiling, as her suggestions were often ignored. So in 1962, by now married and a new mother of a handicapped child, she formed her own company.

When she started her software business, Freelance Programmers, in 1962, British women could not work on the stock exchange floor or even drive a bus. Her initial financing was six pounds (roughly $16.85 then and about $220 today), but she needed her husband’s signature to open the company’s bank account and deposit her own money. (Source: NY Times)

And when she established her company - which she founded sitting at her dining room table - Shirley was driven by a very powerful and innovative idea: "create a place where women could find a work-life balance."

At the time, many educated women left the computer industry after marrying or having a child. Ms. Shirley provided them an opportunity to re-enter the work force while remaining at home, writing code part time with flexible hours.

When Shirley was getting her business off the ground, the letters she wrote to prospective clients often went unanswered. (Hmmmm. Why might that be?) At the suggestion of her husband, she started using the name Steve Shirley, which turned out to be a door opener. (Hmmmm. Why might that be?)  

Admittedly, when Steve Shirley showed up for interviews, those prospective clients were shocked. But her business took off and she experienced quite a bit of success. 

The company designed software for the black-box flight recorder on the Concorde supersonic jet, and for scheduling buses and freight trains. It also developed software protocols that were eventually adopted by NATO.

Ms. Shirley disguised the flexible, work-from-home nature of her business by offering clients fixed prices for projects.

...“Who would have guessed,” she said in a 2020 speech to the British Computer Society, that programming for the Concorde’s flight recorder “was done by a team of 30 women working in their homes?”

In 1993, Shirley sold her business for "150 million pounds, or $225 million at the time." Oh, and lest we forget her greatness, a few years prior she had restructured the company around share ownership, which turned 70 of her employees into millionaires.  

In her retirement, she wrote a memoir, gave talks (of course, she gave a TED Talk!), and became a philanthropist, giving away nearly $100M "primarily to support causes related to information technology and autism" (which her son suffered from). And she has received all sorts of British honors. She's Dame Steve, etc. 

Here's a picture of the travel document of the brilliant and beautiful little girl who survived the Holocaust thanks to the Kindertransport:

On BlueSky, I follow the account of the Auschwitz Museum, which regularly publishes the pictures of children who perished there. When I see the pictures of those bright and lovely children, I always wonder who they might have been. With Steve Shirley we get to know. 

“She was ridiculously ahead of her time,” Sue Black, a computer science professor at Durham University in England, said in an interview. “The thing is, we haven’t even got companies like that now, 65 years later, that really champion women in that way and are led by a woman.”

She should be “one of the best-known people in tech in the world, or at least in the Western world,” Professor Black said.

During her 2015 TED Talk, here's what Steve Shirley had to say:

“You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads. They’re flat on top from being patted patronizingly.”

What a remarkable life. What a remarkable woman. 

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Image Source for Shirley at work: Science Museum UK

Image Source for her travel document: The NY Times article.