Women who lead
She escaped the Nazis as a child, went on to create a tech company with a female workforce and has given millions to charity. Sixty years after she set up her business, Dame Stephanie Shirley CH talks to Joanna Moorhead about her life
From working from home to compressed hours and timetabling work to suit the rest of our lives, the last three years have seen a revolution in how we balance jobs and family. But the world has only been catching up with Dame Stephanie Shirley – she pioneered all this more than half a century ago.
It’s 60 years this month since Stephanie (‘Call me Steve,’ she says, because she discovered early on that signing with a man’s name got her taken more seriously in the business world) founded a company (Freelance Programmers) from her kitchen table. It was groundbreaking not only in what it was doing – software programming – but also in the way it operated, with female staff, mostly mothers, working from home. To mark the date the company was set up, Steve is attending a reunion of 130 of the original women who worked for her, many of whom became millionaires when the company floated on the stock exchange in 1996.
TRUSTING IN WOMEN
In 1962, Steve was 29 and pregnant and understood the need for flexibility in a way few other employers did at the time. ‘We worked around the staff’s needs,’ she says. ‘We had people who only worked in the summer, people who only worked in the winter, full-time, part-time, term-time… You name it, we did it.’
When the pandemic swept away so many of the expectations about working practices, it was a case of back to the future for Steve. One of the things she already knew in the 1960s was the revelation many employers chanced upon in the Covid era: have faith in your staff’s commitment to their jobs and profits go up, not down. ‘Trust people and you find they become more trustworthy,’ she says.
So did she always believe she was a pioneer? ‘I didn’t believe, I hoped. I knew it was right for women. In every survey about women and work, the same two things always come up: flexibility and work/life balance. And we provided both.’ Remarkable success followed: by 1981, the company (now called F International) was worth $3.8bn. A decade later, Steve handed control of it to her employees, modelling the John Lewis & Partners style of workforce-ownership. By the time it had been folded into a Parisbased software company in 2007, it had made not only Steve – who had by then been made a Dame for her services to information technology – but also 70 of her original employees into millionaires.
Talking to her today in her riverside apartment in Henley-on-Thames, it’s hard to believe she’s 88. She looks easily 15 years younger, stylishly dressed in bl
