Goodbye to female tech icon Dame Shirley, who smashed the glass ceiling

Dame Stephanie Shirley has died at the age of 91. The UK's entrepreneurial community has lost an absolute icon.

For the latter part of her life, Dame Shirley dedicated her life to inspiring the next generation of female entrepreneurs, effectively working full-time in her 80s.

Putting women front and centre

Having escaped an awful fate as a Jew in Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK via Kindertransport, she believed that she had better make her life "worth saving".

Part of that meant sharing the deeply difficult lessons she learned as she put women front and centre of her tech empire in the early 1960s.

She broke down stereotypes and let absolutely nothing get in her way, whether it was signing off written pitches as "Steve" to avoid being spiked due to sexism, wearing "unprovocative clothes" or letting talented female coders work from home so they could work around the children and household chores.

A passion for changing women's lives through work

Dame Shirley spoke at Enterprise Nation's Festival of Female Entrepreneurs in Bristol in 2019 and kept everyone in that room spellbound with her raw determination and ambition.

One thing that really stuck with me was her strong desire to support women and change their lives through work. She wanted to give women who were stuck at home a route to earn money, and had a pioneering pro-women recruitment policy at her firm F International.

That quickly changed in 1975 with the Equal Rights Act and she had to let men in – something she described as "great fun".

She recounted stories of women coders typing away at home with their babies wailing in the background. As an employer, she offered flexible working before it was even a thing – part time, full time, flexitime and the ability to find a work life balance.

Her company F International was a crusade and a mission and she said it was never about the money. That said, the firm was valued at almost $3 billion and after selling it, she made 70 of her staff millionaires.

"Co-ownership with the staff was part of my ID – I was given so much as a child refugee, what else could I do but give back?", Dame Shirley told Danielle Newman on her podcast.

Enterprise Nation remembers her with great fondness.