Stephanie Shirley

In 1962, Stephanie Shirley started a software company from her dining-room table with £6². She was thirty years old, a former child refugee who had arrived in England on the Kindertransport in 1939, and she had just spent a decade writing machine code. The company was called Freelance Programmers. Of its first 300 staff, 297 were women.¹

At the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, Shirley was the lone woman among roughly 2,000 male employees. She worked on ERNIE — the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment used to draw Premium Bond numbers — as the only woman on the team. The maths degree she'd spent six years earning in evening classes meant little in practice: promotions went to men, training went to men. By 1959 she had moved to CDL Ltd, where as chief programmer she was responsible for checking software on the ICT 1301. By 1962, having reached chief programmer level, she later said she had "hit the glass ceiling again." She described a decade of physical harassment across the industry — "being fondled, being pushed against the wall" — structural and bodily, both. She wanted her life to have been worth saving. She couldn't see how it would be, sitting where she sat.

At Freelance Programmers, Shirley recruited women with caring responsibilities — mothers, primarily — who wanted professional work they could do at home. The model was radical: no office, programmers needed only a telephone and graph paper to draw flowcharts. Clients, however, were harder to recruit than staff. Her business-development letters received no replies until her husband Derek suggested she sign them "Steve"¹ — the family nickname — and the responses began coming in. One of Freelance Programmers' early commissions came from the Anglo-French consortium developing Concorde. A team of thirty women, all working from their homes, wrote the software for the supersonic aircraft's black box flight recorder.⁴ Shirley later reflected on that project with dry satisfaction: "Who would have guessed" that programming for Concorde's flight recorder "was done by a team of 30 women working in their homes?"⁵

The growth story is visible in the trajectory. First-year revenues were £1,700. By the mid-1960s the company had around 75 regular freelance workers on the panel and was landing commissions from clients including Penguin Books, Esso, and Bird's Eye — alongside the Concorde black box work — offering both programming and statistical analysis. In 1966 Shirley introduced a profit-sharing scheme, the seed of the co-ownership structure that would define the company's culture. By the end of the 1970s, having survived the 1973 stock market crash and rampant inflation in a stretch she later described as a near-liquidator's mentality, revenues had recovered to £2.5 million and the company had extended its reach into Scandinavia and the United States through partnerships. By 1980 it had more than 600 staff. In 1981, when Shirley established the F International Shareholders' Trust, revenues stood at £3.4 million — a concrete transfer of ownership at a moment when the company was a going concern, not a paper promise. The promise paid out 1996 when the company went public and 70 of her staff became millionaires. The stock peaked near $3 billion during the dot-com boom, well above what the company eventually fetched when Steria acquired Xansa in 2007 for approximately £456 million — but by then the equity had already changed the lives of the women who had built it.

In 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act forced Shirley to open hiring to men — her company was among the first organisations to fall foul of the new law⁶. The structural response she had built, though, outlasted the restriction: flexible, home-based, project-based work had become the operating model, not just a workaround. By 1980 the business, renamed F International, had more than 600 staff across the country.⁷ In 1981 Shirley established a shareholders' trust to transfer ownership to employees.⁷ She stepped down as chief executive in 1987⁸ and retired in 1993; by the time the company — now Xansa — reached its peak valuation, it was worth nearly $3 billion¹ and the equity-sharing structure Shirley had built had made 70 of her staff millionaires at no cost to anyone but herself⁹.

Giles, born in 1963, had lost his ability to speak at age two and was diagnosed with severe autism.¹⁰ Shirley and her husband Derek worked shifts to care for him as his needs grew more complex, and the experience put her in contact with the near-total absence of specialist services. In 1994 she founded Autism at Kingwood, a residential support charity — Giles was its first resident.¹ He died in 1998, aged 35.³ She had already been establishing what would become the Shirley Foundation, and after his death she directed the bulk of her fortune into it: over £67 million in grants, focused on autism research and information technology¹¹, including Prior's Court, a residential school for seventy autistic pupils³, and Autistica, the UK's national autism research charity¹¹.

Shirley was the first female president of the British Computer Society, serving from 1989 to 1990.¹² In 2001 she gave more than £10 million to found the Oxford Internet Institute¹³, a department of the University of Oxford dedicated to studying the internet's social consequences — an institution that is still operating. In 2017 she was appointed a Companion of Honour, one of only 65 people worldwide to hold the title at any one time¹⁴, for her services to entrepreneurship and philanthropy. She died on 9 August 2025, aged 91, in a nursing home in Reading.³