2018 Museum Fellow Dame Stephanie Shirley

By Dag Spicer | April 11, 2018

For a lifetime of entrepreneurship promoting the growth of the UK software industry and the advancement of women in computing.

— Fellow Awards Selection Committee, Computer History Museum

In the 1960s, decades before flex hours, family leave, or onsite daycare, Dame Stephanie Shirley recognized both a lack of professional opportunities for women raising and supporting families and an underrepresentation of women in the computing industry. In 1962 she decided to do something about it. Shirley founded Freelance Programmers, a UK company that trained and offered women who had left the workforce gainful employment as programmers. The company grew quickly and, by 1975, employed 300 programmers—297 of them women. The company was created by a woman for women.

On April 28, 2018, Dame Stephanie Shirley, with fellow honorees Guido van Rossum and Dov Frohman-Bentchkowsky, will be inducted in the Computer History Museum’s prestigious Hall of Fellows.

Vera Buchtal, a.k.a Stephanie Shirley, ca. 1940

Vera Buchtal, a.k.a Stephanie Shirley, ca. 1940

Just weeks before the start of the Second World War, two young Austrian Jewish girls were put on a train and sent to England for safety. They were part of a larger effort, known as the Kindertransport, which ultimately saved thousands of children from Hitler’s concentration camps by getting them out of Germany before the looming war began. The two girls, originally surnamed Buchtal and soon renamed Renate and Stephanie Brook, arrived at Liverpool Street station at ages 9 and 5 respectively and spent the war in the English countryside under the care of a middle class couple, Guy and Ruby Smith. Although she would only mention it explicitly later in her life, her experience as a refugee made her feel very lucky to have been saved.

A lonely but stable childhood was passed by reading and studying mathematics at the local boys’ school, as math wasn’t a subject taught at her (girls’) school. After very hard work and a great deal of emotional turmoil relating to her parents, Brook graduated from a four-year college with a bachelor’s in mathematics. She applied to the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, probably the summit of electrical and communications engineering in the UK at the time. It was at Dollis Hill that engineer Tommy Flowers had designed the Colossus family of code breaking machines (1943) and, while few knew the details of his wartime work, he was greatly respected and admired. Shirley worked in a different part of the building but would one day meet her future husband there, Derek Shirley.

Mr. and Mrs. Derek and Stephanie Shirley

Mr. and Mrs. Derek and Stephanie Shirley

While Shirley’s mathematical skills were appreciated and in demand, she encountered the infamous glass ceiling when she attempted to apply for a promotion. She was explicitly told not to apply because of her gender. Shirley recalls the atmosphere at Dollis Hill:

There were scarcely a dozen women in the whole establishment, and walking into the main canteen reminded me of walking into a boys’ school . . . hundreds of heads would turn and gawp at me with expressions that might have indicated a variety of things but certainly didn’t indicate respect.”1

It was this limiting atmosphere that caused her to resign and take up another job with GEC, a computer maker. There she came into her own as a programmer, but GEC, as well, saw only her gender and limited her opportunities for advancement or making meaningful contributions. It was at this point that Stephanie “had an idea.”

Still only 29, her brainstorm was to start a company of women, for women, to capitalize on the large untapped labor pool of women programmers who had had to leave the job market, giving up their careers, to look after their families at home. But starting a company was new territory for Shirley. She sums up some of her early challenges:

I had no capital to speak of. I had no experience running a company. I had no employees, no office, no customers, and no reason to believe that any companies out there were interested in buying my product. Nobody sold software in those days. In so far as it existed, it was given away for free.2

In spite of this bleak prognosis, Shirley started her company at her kitchen table and worked hard drumming up business, initially relying on personal contacts for work.

Stephanie Shirley and her son Giles, at 3 months.

Stephanie Shirley and her son Giles, at 3 months.

In 1964, Derek and Stephanie had a boy, Giles, who was profoundly autistic and for the rest of their lives, the couple would devote unending patience and caring for him. Derek even retired early to look after him. From this point on, the business, called F International, would occupy most of Stephanie’s time, while any off time was spent with Giles. It was a grueling life and both parents struggled to make sense of Giles’ destructive behavior and rages. “The depressing thing was that no matter how hard we worked, things never got better.”

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, F International gradually became profitable. One of Shirley’s proudest accomplishments was creating an employee stock ownership plan in which F’s caring, home-based, female-friendly corporate structure could flourish even more. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, and a public flotation of their stock, Shirley became very wealthy as did quite a few of F’s early employees, who became instant millionaires. She decided, as she left the company in the early 1980s, to spend the rest of her life supporting important causes, chief among which was information technology and autism, in memory of Giles who had passed away of a seizure in his sleep.

The story of Dame Stephanie Shirley is unique in history.3 At a time when women were viewed as objects incapable of serious work, Shirley left the glass ceiling behind and built not just a company but a way of life for her employees. She then selflessly gave of the fruits of that novel and groundbreaking company to help those less fortunate. She pioneered a new way of working,

The story of Dame Stephanie Shirley is unique in history.3 At a time when women were viewed as objects incapable of serious work, Shirley left the glass ceiling behind and built not just a company but a way of life for her employees. She then selflessly gave of the fruits of that novel and groundbreaking company to help those less fortunate. She pioneered a new way of working,

The story of Dame Stephanie Shirley is unique in history.3 At a time when women were viewed as objects incapable of serious work, Shirley left the glass ceiling behind and built not just a company but a way of life for her employees. She then selflessly gave of the fruits of that novel and groundbreaking company to help those less fortunate. She pioneered a new way of working, for men and women, believing that people, not money, were the most important thing in life.

Notes

  • Stephanie Shirley, Let It Go: The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley (England: Andrews UK Ltd., 2012), 53.
  • Shirley, 66.
  • A full of oral history of Dame Stephanie Shirley was conducted by the Computer History Museum on January 18, 2018, for the occasion of the 2018 Fellow Awards.

About the Fellow Awards

Since its inception in 1987, when the Museum inducted its first Fellow, computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the Fellow Awards at the Computer History Museum have honored distinguished individuals and pioneering teams whose contributions have forever transformed our world. Backed by technology leaders, innovators, and visionaries from around world, the Fellow Awards are a time-honored tradition that celebrate the creative spirit and preserve the stories of each honoree, advancing the world’s collective history and inspiring future generations.

Fellow nominations are open to the public and reflect a diverse range of viewpoints and areas of computing. Final selections are made by a panel of historians, researchers, industry leaders, Museum staff and past Fellows. Learn more about the Fellow Awards.

About The Author

Dag Spicer oversees the Museum’s permanent historical collection, the most comprehensive repository of computers, software, media, oral histories, and ephemera relating to computing in the world. He also helps shape the Museum’s exhibitions, marketing, and education programs, responds to research inquiries, and has given hundreds of interviews on computer history and related topics to major print and electronic news outlets such as NPR, the New York Times, The Economist, and CBS News. A native Canadian, Dag most recently attended Stanford University before joining the Museum in 1996.

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