Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie Shirley, born Vera Buchthal in 1933 in Germany, is a British technology pioneer, businesswoman and philanthropist who shaped women's participation in computing in the United Kingdom. She founded Freelance Programmers in 1959 with six pounds in capital, deliberately building a workplace offering flexible and remote programming work to women with family responsibilities decades before such arrangements became standard, and adopted the professional name Steve because letters signed with her own name went unanswered in the male-dominated industry; her programming team worked on Concorde's flight recorder systems. She retired in 1993 after the company's flotation made many of her staff millionaires through profit-sharing, and went on to donate more than 67 million pounds to charitable causes, particularly autism research through the Shirley Foundation she established in 1986. Shirley served as the first female president of the British Computer Society from 1989 to 1990 and was appointed a Dame Commander in 2000.