Stephanie Shirley, Who Created a Tech World for Women, Dies at 91

Stephanie Shirley, a British tech pioneer who cleverly used the name Steve to gain a foothold in the male-dominated world of computing and get her software company off the ground in the early 1960s, hiring almost exclusively women as an early promoter of remote work, died on Aug. 9 in Reading, England. She was 91.

Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Lynn Hart, her spokeswoman, who said that Ms. Shirley had experienced a brief illness.

A refugee at age 5 from Nazi-occupied Austria just before World War II, she lived with a foster family in the West Midlands of England, near the Wales border. She often expressed appreciation for her adopted country, which gave her a “life worth saving,” she said, but she found career opportunities there for girls and women in the 1950s and early ’60s to be limited and stultifying.

In a 2015 TED Talk, Ms. Shirley said, “You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads — they’re flat on top from being patted patronizingly.”

Ms. Shirley started her company at her dining room table with a revolutionary intention: to offer other women a work-life balance. At the time, many educated women left the computer industry after marrying or having a child. Ms. Shirley provided them an opportunity to re-enter the work force while remaining at home, writing code part-time with flexible hours.

When the company’s name was changed to F International — and then F1, and eventually Xansa — the F stood not only for freelance but also for flexible and free. In job interviews, she asked applicants one simple question: “Do you have access to a telephone?”

But there were early frustrations. When she sent business letters signed Stephanie Shirley, they often went unanswered. At the suggestion of her husband, Derek Shirley, a physicist she married in 1959, she began introducing herself in correspondence as Steve.

Increasingly, prospective clients granted her interviews, although she could see when she walked through the door, she later told the British newspaper The Telegraph, “that they were almost annoyed at themselves at having been conned.”

Still, work orders picked up, and she began hiring more programmers. Of her first 300 employees, 297 were women. The company designed software for the black box flight recorder on the Concorde supersonic jet, and for scheduling buses and freight trains. It also developed software protocols that were eventually adopted by NATO.

Ms. Shirley disguised the flexible, work-from-home nature of her business by offering clients fixed prices for projects. Her goal was for her company to be treated the same as any other company.

In 1975, an anti-discrimination law required Ms. Shirley to diversify her work force, and she started hiring more men. In 1991, she began restructuring her company to share ownership with her employees. By her count, 70 eventually became millionaires.

As she grew more prominent, she became widely known in Britain as Steve or Dame Steve. (In 2000, she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; in 2017, she was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for her work in information technology and her philanthropy.)

“She was ridiculously ahead of her time,” Sue Black, a computer science professor at Durham University in England, said in an interview. “The thing is, we haven’t even got companies like that now, 65 years later, that really champion women in that way and are led by a woman.”

After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, her father hiked through mountainous terrain into neutral Switzerland. In July 1939, Vera and her 9-year-old sister, Renate, were put on a Kindertransport train to London from Vienna. They were among roughly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, rescued by the British from Nazi-occupied territories.

The girls’ parents eventually joined them in England, but the dislocation of war left the family relationships strained. Vera bonded with her foster parents, Guy and Ruby Smith, and became a British citizen when she turned 18, changing her legal name to Stephanie Brook.

She showed an aptitude for mathematics, but the girls’ high school she attended in the town of Oswestry did not offer the subject, so she took classes at a nearby boys’ school, where her tuition was subsidized. She found the experience distasteful, she told the BBC, because of the whistles and catcalls from other students, but tolerable.

After high school, she worked at a post office research center in London, helping to develop electronic telephone exchanges and a computer called ERNIE that generated random numbers for a monthly lottery.

For six years, she took night classes, earning an honors degree in mathematics from Sir John Cass College, a technical school, in 1959. Then she spent 18 months working at a small company, designing an early computer. But she found herself bumping against a glass ceiling, as her suggestions were often ignored. So in 1962, she formed her own company.

During a recession in the 1970s, she feared the company might go bankrupt. To convince herself that things would eventually improve, she took to wearing a fur coat given to her by her husband on their 10th wedding anniversary, she told The Times of London in 2024, putting it on every day “just to show that I wasn’t bankrupt yet!”

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. In 1993, she retired and sold the company for an estimated 150 million pounds, or $225 million at the time. (The company later went through mergers and acquisitions and reached a valuation of roughly $3 billion.)

After retiring, Ms. Shirley wrote a memoir, “Let It Go” (2012), and devoted much of her time to philanthropy, noting in her 2015 TED Talk, “I am only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers.” According to news accounts and her website, she gave away 70 million pounds (about $94.5 million), primarily to support causes related to information technology and autism.

Her son, Giles, was born in the early 1960s, around the time she started her company. He was autistic, had epilepsy and experienced debilitating seizures. Ms. Shirley spoke openly and wrote about how she and her husband struggled to care for Giles, who died in 1998 at 35, and how she considered suicide and experienced a nervous breakdown. She established two autism charities — a school for young people and a provider of supportive living for adults — and in 2004, founded Autistica, Britain’s first national autism research charity.

Ms. Shirley left no immediate survivors. Her husband died in 2021; her sister died several years ago.

She should be “one of the best-known people in tech in the world, or at least in the Western world,” Professor Black said.

Instead, she added, “when everyone thinks of technology, we usually think of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. It’s always the guys.”