Obituary: Dame Stephanie Shirley

Stephanie Shirley arrived in this country as a five-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany in 1939. After her father, a judge, was interned as a German citizen, she and her sister were brought up by a British foster family. Despite her clearly-evident talent for mathematics, she decided against going to university and took a job in the Post Office’s research department, eventually working with Ernie, the computer that picked the weekly premium-bond winners. It was while working at the Post Office that she studied for her BSc in Mathematics at Birkbeck in the evenings. She moved from the Post Office into the computing company ICL, but realising that the glass ceiling was so low, she left shortly afterwards. Writing off for other jobs, she found that the suspicion of women in the world of information technology was widespread. It was only when, at the suggestion of her husband, she began to sign her name as Steve rather than Stephanie Shirley that the invitations to interview began to come.

In 1962, with a first child in the offing, Steve founded a company called Freelancers International, and its aim was to link together female programmers and software designers working flexibly from home to supply computer software services. Like many a Birkbeck student, especially those who must balance family, academic and professional responsibilities, she saw ways of taking advantage of the very complexity and discontinuity that can paralyse women’s lives. It was a company run by a woman exclusively for women.

Steve was one of the first to see the powerful affinity between the way her company was organised and what it was making. She devoted thirty years of her life to the FI group. When she retired from it, in September 1993, it was one of the largest companies of its type in the country.