Dame Steve: A Profile in Brilliance and Defiance

I was the first woman ‘this’, the only woman ‘that’ and opened the door for many women, especially in high tech … I led a team into a sustainable organisation employing eight and a half thousand people.

To encounter Dame Stephanie Shirley is to be reminded that history’s most impressive figures are seldom those who merely survived their circumstances, but rather those who transmuted their pain into purpose with an alchemist’s determination. The woman known professionally as “Steve” carries herself with what the Americans might call chutzpah and the British, with characteristic understatement, might term “formidable resilience.” Young women today would simply call her a badass, and they would be absolutely right.

Dame Stephanie arrived on British shores in 1939, a five-year-old Jewish refugee on the Kindertransport, that most poignant of rescue missions that plucked children from the gathering Nazi darkness. 

Deposited with a Quaker family in the English countryside, she grew up with that peculiar duality of the displaced—grateful but hauntedThis existential liminality became not a handicap but the wellspring of her extraordinary drive.

“Even in the blackest moments of despair there is hope,” she has said, “if one can find the courage to pursue it.” This sentiment, which may sound like a platitude poached from a greeting card is in her case understandable.  A five year old who arrived in a foreign country who necessarily had to make sense of shock therapy necessitated by war. 

Mathematics became her sanctuary and her trusted weapon. While her contemporaries were being lined up to become good wives and secretaries under the inclusive yoke of femininity, Stephanie was being shuttled to boys’ schools for advanced maths.  Her highly unique path to building a 3 billion tech company was underway. The local library became her Alexandrian temple,  a place to give her the references that one day would give her the vision and resilience to fight the status quo. 

“I’m nominally retired but the trauma of my childhood remains a powerful driver in my life. I determined at a ridiculously young age to make mine a life that had been worth saving; I don’t fritter my days away but am a rabid workaholic. I have never had, nor ever aspired to, what other people call work/life balance. I am defined by my work: it’s not just something I do when I’d rather be doing something else. We create our most lasting legacy not in what we leave behind but in the way we live.”

By nineteen, she was at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, constructing computers with the meticulous patience of a medieval cathedral builder and writing code in machine language. This was an era when the very concept of computing was in its infancy, when the electric abacus would be replaced by the digital brain. It was also an era when being female in such an environment was to carry a permanent asterisk beside one’s name: *competent, but inconveniently equipped with a womb.

The sexism was not subtle. While performing complex calculations for undersea cable layouts, she was cheerfully informed that she would never be permitted on the ships where her work would be implemented. Women were welcome to crunch the numbers but not to board the vessels that would carry them into practical application. In the patriarchal ledger of the 1950s, XX chromosomes were still categorized under “overhead expenses.”

The early signs of her determination not to be the girl providing tea and coffee to her boss for the rest of her life reared into view. Her Quaker family had not been able to let her go to university in the traditional route.  Instead she signed up for evening classes in order to pursue a degree.  This double life ended six years later with her gaining an honours degree

“And, this is the beginning of saying, well why not? I mean I’m just as good as the guy sitting opposite me pounding his desk calculator. And I became somewhat assertive I suppose.

When Cambridge hosted the inaugural meeting of the Computer Society, her request to attend as a delegate was predictably rebuffed. Lesser spirits might have retreated into resentment; Dame Stephanie simply took holiday leave and funded herself. “I wasn’t going to be held back by some of these social norms… ” 

Her marriage to a fellow Post Office employee presented a new roadblock. Listening to office gossip,  she read the runes and her professional obituary.  With depressing predictability, her status as “wife” threatened to eclipse her identity as “professional.” While her husband could aspire to the heights of success, she would be forever typecast as the lady-in-waiting, presumed to be merely killing time until the arrival of children. Once again, she sliced through the Gordian knot of convention, leaving both the Post Office and public service. 

She now switched horses – venturing into the world of business proper.  For a time, she thrived under a boss enlightened enough to grant her substantive responsibilities providing her with the opportunity to project manage whole projects.  Predictably she loved it; but then one incident – which she is slightly coy about – made her realize that talent would only get her so far.  She had in all effects hit the glass ceiling.  Rather than remain staring at it resentfully, she packed up her bags for a second time. 

This pattern—of recognizing when a situation has exhausted its potential, of refusing to settle for the crumbs of recognition—emerges as a leitmotif of her life.. Where others might have seen resignation as prudence, Dame Stephanie recognized it as surrender. Her calculus was simple: if talent alone was insufficient to overcome prejudice, then she would create a context where talent could flourish unimpeded by the arbitrary restrictions of gender.

And thus, Freelance Programmers was born in 1962, when Dame Stephanie was just 29. The company’s original prospectus might as well have been inscribed on stone tablets for all its revolutionary simplicity: “to provide jobs for women with children.” Later, this would evolve to “to provide careers for women with children” and finally to “to provide careers for women with dependents”—the linguistic shift from “jobs” to “careers” and from “children” to “dependents” reflecting the expansion of her vision from mere employment to genuine economic empowerment.

The rechristening of Stephanie as “Steve” was a tactical concession to the realities of business in the 1960s. At her husband’s suggestion, she began signing business correspondence as “Steve,” a nom de guerre that granted her proposals at least the dignity of consideration before the revelation of her gender could trigger automatic rejection. That she still uses this moniker today serves as both a wry commentary on the prejudices she overcame and a badge of the battles she has won.

Her business model was revolutionary not merely in its feminist principles but in its operational prescience. Long before Silicon Valley discovered the virtues of remote work, Dame Stephanie’s programmers were coding from their home dining tables, often in the twilight hours after children had been tucked into bed. She pioneered profit-sharing, job-sharing, and co-ownership decades before such arrangements became fashionable in corporate manifestos.

The gamble paid dividends that transcended the merely financial. Her predominantly female workforce, liberated from the constraints of traditional office structures, responded with loyalty and productivity that would make a modern HR director weep with envy. Between 1977 and 1979, revenue doubled—a testament not just to the quality of their work but to the power of Dame Stephanie’s revolutionary proposition: that women need not choose between intellectual fulfillment and there family responsibilities. 

Ironically, it was the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act in the mid-1970s that introduced the first cracks in her utopian model. The legal requirement to consider male applicants began to dilute the company’s distinctively feminine ethos. The cohesion that had characterized the early years was gradually stretched thin as the company expanded to employ 8,000 people.

Dame Stephanie’s decision to step aside as CEO in favour of Hilary Cropper marked both the culmination of her vision and, paradoxically, the beginning of its dilution. Cropper, schooled in conventional corporate structures, brought a more traditional approach that ultimately undermined the collaborative culture Dame Stephanie had cultivated. As one long-time employee memorably put it, they “bought in the ‘male virus’… the ‘male infection'”—a vivid metaphor for the corporatization of what had been a uniquely female enterprise.

Yet even as her company evolved away from its founding principles, Dame Stephanie’s legacy was secure. She had demonstrated, in the most practical terms, that flexibility, autonomy, and respect for the complexity of women’s lives could coexist with commercial success. What most companies belatedly discovered during the Covid pandemic of 2020, Dame Stephanie had intuited half a century earlier.

Stepping down from her own company gave Dame Shirley a new lease of life.  Throughout the period in which she was at the helm, she had nursed a private tragedy.  Her son,  Giles, was severely autistic.  After he died and relieved from her self-imposed business life,  she turned her attention to what she terms a pseudo-academic life – researching on the causes of autism and encouraging new directions of research . She is undauntingly bracing about what this involves:

“Much that other people find important is just “stuff”. I focus on ideas, on learning and on innovation generally – the things that I know and care about. I work hard, recover from the many blind alleys and am motivated to succeed. My success was found at the edge of failure.”

Just as she became a pioneer in entrepreneurship,  she now counts as one of Britain’s greatest philanthropists. 

In an era when female entrepreneurs were celebrated as novelties rather than necessities, Dame Stephanie’s story serves as both inspiration and rebuke. Her journey from Kindertransport refugee to dame commander of the British Empire represents not just personal triumph but a template for what might have been—and what might yet be—if we were to take seriously the proposition that talent is distributed equally, even if opportunity is not.

The tragedy is not that Dame Stephanie was exceptional, but that her vision remains exceptional still. In the glossy brochures of corporate diversity initiatives, her principles are paid constant lip service. In practice, they remain as radical today as they were when she first articulated them from her kitchen table, with six pounds in capital and a telephone as her only assets. The true measure of our progress will be when the ideas that made Dame Stephanie revolutionary in her time become so commonplace as to seem utterly unremarkable in ours.

What any female older entrepreneurs can learn from her:

Looking back, I wish I’d brought in financial skills much earlier in my company’s development. It was 25 years before it paid a dividend – for comparison, Microsoft took ten years. I should have stepped back from operational management much earlier and handed over to professionals: a classic mistake of many entrepreneurs. More broadly, it’s a question of doing what matters to you – and holding onto your goals and ideals.