#51 1959 · Stephanie Shirley / Freelance Programmers (later F International) · Softwarebuy-the-mispriced
She signed her letters 'Steve' to beat client sexism, then built her software firm from the women the industry wouldn't hire
the problem
Male-run tech clients wouldn't take a woman's software business seriously
background
In postwar Britain, a woman running a software business could not get a reply to a business letter signed with her own name — prospective clients simply didn't respond. The standard advice for a woman facing this kind of gatekeeping was to fight the bias directly: campaign, complain, wait for attitudes to change.
Stephanie Shirley, a Jewish refugee who had arrived in Britain alone as a child on the Kindertransport, needed clients now, not eventually, to get a company off the ground with £6 in starting capital.
the move
At her husband Derek's suggestion, Shirley began signing business correspondence 'Steve' — a family nickname — which got her letters answered before anyone realized the company's founder was a woman. She then built Freelance Programmers almost entirely from a talent pool the rest of the industry was ignoring: of the company's first 300 staff, only three were men. Women with children, pushed out of the workforce by the era's expectations, were hired on part-time, work-from-home contracts decades before either was standard practice anywhere.
the payoff
The nearly all-female hiring model ran until Britain's 1975 Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to hire on that basis. By then the company — renamed F International, later FI Group — had grown into a business valued at close to $3 billion by 2000. When it floated on the stock market in 1996, Shirley's staff co-ownership structure made more than 70 of her employees millionaires.
what came after
Shirley gave away most of her resulting fortune, including more than £67 million to charitable causes such as autism research, and told the story widely — including in a widely viewed TED talk — before her death in 2025. Obituaries in the Financial Times and Telegraph credit the business model itself, not just her personal persistence, with opening British tech employment to women decades before the industry's own diversity initiatives caught up.
filed under
references
- [1]Wikipedia — Steve ShirleyWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Dame Stephanie Shirley — official biography, 'Story'steveshirley.com, 2026steveshirley.com