Stephanie Shirley: The Mathematician Who Made Billions of Dollars from a Software Company by Posing as a Man

Stephanie Shirley was known simply as 'Steve' for a long time.

With this name he signed hundreds of letters to promote his software business. During this time no one paid attention to their gender whether they were male or female.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he also fought against gender discrimination, created jobs especially for women and introduced revolutionary ideas such as working outside the office, from home, etc.

Although initially no one believed in her success, but now 91-year-old Stephanie Shirley is the owner of three billion dollars. Thus she emerged as a tycoon in today's technology world and also became the first independent programmer in the world.

Escape from Nazi Germany

Stephanie Shirley was born Vera Buchthal in Dortmund, Germany.

In 1939, when she was only five years old, she was separated from her Jewish parents due to the growing threat of the Nazis. His father was a judge.

She boarded the Kindertransport train with her nine-year-old sister Renate, which carried thousands of Jewish refugee children to Britain.

Stephanie Shirley told the BBC in 2019: 'I was holding my sister's hand and the poor thing had to sort out mine and her other problems.'

These sisters arrived in the central region of England 'West Midlands' where they were adopted by a family.

Although she maintained contact with her parents, according to her, she was never able to improve her relationship with them.

Separation from him and escape from Germany were the two triggers that changed his life and became his strength instead of his weakness.

Proficient in Mathematics

As a child, she excelled in her academic performance, especially in mathematics.

They even had to be transferred to a children's school, where classes in this subject were taught, so that they could learn according to their skills.

When she finished school, she went to work at the Post Office Research Station, a leading department in the development and use of computers in Britain.

Stephanie, one of the few female employees, helped write computer programs, which was quite unusual for the time.

To stop her fans from freaking out, she told them that she worked at a post office, hoping that they would think that she just sold stamps and that they were not a big threat to her.

There she met physicist Derek Shirley, whom she married. So she changed her name to Stephanie Shirley.

Although she claims that she loved her job at the post office, she also admits that gender discrimination was a major obstacle to her advancement there.

"My boss didn't offer me a promotion because I was a woman," she told the BBC in 2019.

She said that 'I was completely fed up with gender discrimination. I used to stand with my back against the wall so that no one could touch my buttocks. And I used to avoid certain types of people and then there were many other things that I left this job.'

Stephanie or Steve?

After some time in 1962, he decided to start his own computer company called 'Freelance Programmers'.

This plan seemed very impractical.

There were three main reasons for this. The first thing was that she was a woman. Second, they only had ten dollars. And the third thing was that they did not have an office but only a 'dining room'.

Moreover, their idea was to sell software, which at the time did not seem very valuable. According to the experts in this field, it is actually the hardware that will remain important. At that time software had lost its importance so it was a novel idea to try to sell it.

'They actually laughed at me because I was a woman,' she told the BBC.

But I'm a proud person and I didn't like it. So I was determined to win at all costs. And then it happened.

He started working hard. He sought out potential customers and wrote hundreds of letters to them, trying to convince them that to really take advantage of computers, they needed to develop programs that would tell the machines what to do.

But all this was met with opposition in the industry and his ideas were ignored. Her husband then suggested to her that if she started signing letters with a man's name.

It was only then that he adopted the alias 'Steve Shirley' and to his surprise, he started receiving replies to his email.

From day one, he promised that the company would employ only women if possible. And of the first 300 employees, 297 were actually women.

She preferred those who had children because she knew they would have trouble finding work.

They allowed such women to work from home so that they could take care of the children more easily. It was a completely revolutionary thing in the 60s.

The women wrote programs with pencil and paper and sent them by mail.

The company grew rapidly until it employed more than 4,000 women at its peak.

In 1975, the company was forced to hire men after the UK's Sex Discrimination Act was passed.

Ironically, a firm built to combat gender discrimination in the workplace suddenly found itself at risk of violating a regulation that sought just that.

'That's the way it should be,' said Stephanie. A mixed workforce is much more creative.'

By the 1980s the company was already well-known around the world, having developed a program for highly valued companies and other landmarks such as the Concorde aircraft black box.

Stephanie Shirley ran Freelance Programmers for 25 years. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 as Zensa and was valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.

This year he surprised everyone again with an unusual decision: he gave a portion of his shares to employees, who owned more than half of the company.

Since the 2000s, Stephanie Shirley has dedicated herself to philanthropy.

He has devoted a significant portion of his fortune and time to the study of autism, as his son Giles, who died in 1998 at the age of 35, suffered from severe autism.

Although the UK awarded him the prestigious title of 'Dame' in 2000 for his 'Services to Information Technology', people close to him still refer to him as 'Steve'.