In this episode, we are joined by one of the UKs most celebrated and inspirational businesswomen - entrepreneur and venture philanthropist, Dame Stephanie Shirley, CH. Shaped by her experiences as a child refugee, fleeing Nazi Vienna for the UK without her parents at the age of five, Dame Shirley vowed to make her life one worth saving. In the early 1960s, against all norms of the time, she founded her own women-only software business, pioneering new ways of working and opening doors for women in the workplace. Thirty years later that business was valued at almost $3bn and floated on the London Stock Exchange. She is now a successful venture philanthropist, supporting causes close to her heart and investing in the future of the technology industry. She has given away the majority of her wealth and is the first person to drop out of the Sunday Times Rich List as a result of philanthropic giving. Her life, career achievements and generosity are truly nothing less than remarkable.
In this episode, we are joined by one of the UKs most celebrated and inspirational businesswomen - entrepreneur and venture philanthropist, Dame Stephanie Shirley, CH.
Shaped by her experiences as a child refugee, fleeing Nazi Vienna for the UK without her parents at the age of five, Dame Shirley vowed to make her life one worth saving.
In the early 1960s, against all norms of the time, she founded her own women-only software business, pioneering new ways of working and opening doors for women in the workplace. Thirty years later that business was valued at almost $3bn and floated on the London Stock Exchange.
She is now a successful venture philanthropist, supporting causes close to her heart and investing in the future of the technology industry. She has given away the majority of her wealth and is the first person to drop out of the Sunday Times Rich List as a result of philanthropic giving.
Her life, career achievements and generosity are truly nothing less than remarkable.
Laura Madon
Hello and welcome to the next episode of the Tech Leaders podcast with Mazars. For those of you new to the podcast, welcome. And for those of you returning, welcome back. I'm Laura, your host. Today we are joined by one of the UK's most celebrated and inspirational businesswoman, entrepreneur and venture philanthropist Dame Stephanie Shirley. Shaped by her experiences as a child refugee fleeing Nazi Vietnam at the age of five without her parents and coming to the UK, Dame Stephanie vowed to make her life one worth saving in the early 1960s against all norms.
Laura Madon
At the time, she founded a women only software company, pioneering new ways of working and opening doors for women in the workplace. 30 years later, the business was valued at over $3 billion and floated on the London Stock Exchange. She's now a successful venture philanthropist, supporting causes close to her hearts and investing in the technology industry. She's given away the majority of her wealth and is the first person to drop off the Sunday Times rich list through philanthropic giving her life career, achievements and generosity are truly remarkable.
Laura Madon
So let's welcome Dame Stephanie Shirley. I'm delighted to be speaking to you today as part of tech for leaders podcast.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Great pleasure to be here, Laura.
Laura Madon
So you're known for your many remarkable achievements in your lifetime. Amongst them blazing the trails women in the workplace and fighting for women's rights. So it's interesting that you're also affectionately known as Steve. Could you give us some background into this name?
Laura Madon
Well, in the early days before the days of email, I used to write lots of promotional letters to prospective customers. And I would do about ten or 12 a week, something like that, and basically got no reply. And I looked at my letter again, could I improve it? And I did it, but eventually realized that it was probably because of that double feminine signature.
Laura Madon
Stephanie Shirley Shirley being my marital name and my dear husband suggested that I use the family nickname of Steve. So I wrote the same sort of letters to the same sort of prospects signing the Steve Shirley. And surprise, surprise, I began to get some replies and I began to get some meetings. I began to get some work.
Laura Madon
This is just amazing, isn't it? I mean, it may be jumping ahead in your story, but I think it brilliantly summarizes the biases that you've faced. And I was wondering, do you think these biases are still being faced by women in the workplace?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, sadly, yes, I do. But they are cultural rather than legal. These days. I mean, my generation was fighting legal strictures that I couldn't work on the stock exchange, that I couldn't open the company's bank account without my husband's authorization, that I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane, all sorts of things. But nowadays, those are all gone.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
One is left with a cultural thing, with young women still complaining vociferously that they're not listened to and that their ideas are adopted by others without recognition and generally find a wealth of micro-aggressions. They talk about none of which is is. We're not talking about sexual aggressions here, none of which is terribly serious, but together a debilitating hour of patronizing, all d energizing so that women can't really do their best.
Laura Madon
Yeah. How do you think women can overcome those microaggressions?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
If you approach the micro-aggressions as microaggressions and laugh them off, that's a very nice way to defuze the anger that lies beneath them because it is anti-women, it is anti feminist and not to take them too seriously. However, when I hear sexism, or for that matter, racism or I do always challenge it, I'm even in a meeting, a big meeting.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
I say, How Don, you can't say that? And I just say it as if I've been quoting some H.R. Primos somewhere. So it's not easy. I don't think it ever will be easy, but I do think it needs to be treated lightly.
Laura Madon
Yeah. And it's confident and bravery to stand up and say that. Yes. And I guess going back a little bit to to when you were growing up in the UK, you attended an all girls school where maths wasn't on the curriculum, but.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
All the schools were unisex in those days.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah.
Laura Madon
And it was so you so determined to pursue your interest in in maths that you walked to the boys School for Maths and science lessons. Can you tell us about that? What sparked your interest in the subject?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, surprisingly I find maths actually beautiful. It's rather like music listening to, but it's like solving a mathematical problem. So I was quite clear that I wanted to do that. And the school I was in, Oswestry, which is a border town on Wales, really did very well and arranged for me to go to the boys school just for maths lessons.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
And that was a useful introduction to the sexism of the workplace because they were all unisex. It was a girls school and the boys school and they were just about within walking distance. I was always leaving one lesson and going to the other. But I did get qualified in maths eventually and I still love it and it's what it's allowed me to contribute to the tech industry.
Laura Madon
Yeah, it's interesting that you make that comparison between the the kind of the way that the schools were set up then and the tech industry maybe then and now. I'm interested. Do you think more should be done to get girls interested in STEM at an early age? And what can companies do to kind of foster the future leaders seem?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, the future leaders are being recruited today. Yeah. And so one really needs a very open, welcoming, positive, positively welcoming recruitment process. So that means one has to look at adverts and how the headhunters are primed are not what is not primed, how the headhunters are briefed in order to make sure that women are not put off and that women are treated fairly.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who's not known for the work that she did for women, one of the things she did was to insist that all the shortlists included a woman. This is some years back, and that didn't bring a lot of women into positions of power, but it did bring them to the notice of other people. One of the things that women have to do, we have to be remembered.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Remember to what we can do and what we are, not just for gender. What we're wearing. I mean, I stress about appearance, of course, but you need to somehow distinguish yourself. What have you got that is different? That is interesting. That is novel, that a novelty, you know, innovation is just so important. It's no use doing what we did last month or last year.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
EVANS Because it's all changed and you need to rethink all that time. And this is how women have found it. Yeah.
Laura Madon
So it's improving that visibility and that kind of the voice for women.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yes, the voice for women. I know I got invited onto all sorts of boards and committees because they wanted a woman. It was a time and I didn't want to be a token woman, but I accepted and just made sure that my contribution was exactly the same as everybody else, You know? Did I make the group fulfill its purpose?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Did I help make that happen? And that's what people remember, that when I was there, it went better.
Laura Madon
Yeah, that's brilliant. And I know that when you when you left school, you went straight into work. What kind of made you choose a computing industry?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Oh, well, it almost chose me. Really. I wanted to be the world's greatest mathematician and solve something called Fermat's Last Theorem. And it was very obvious at 18 that I wasn't going to be able to make that. I just didn't have that sort of intellect with the computer. It just became a law and basically law. I just fell in love with it.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
It was really so exciting, so fresh, so new. And in the early days there were quite a lot of women that got then screws out as the thing became more professional.
Laura Madon
That's really interesting. And it's interesting because that's exactly why I joined the tech industry now.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
It's exciting.
Laura Madon
It's still evolving. It's still different every day and every every month, every year. So that's really.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
That's the thing that I find even more exciting is we know that there's no end. Yeah, we have as far as I could take further, you'll never be satisfied because there's always another stage.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah. And what was it like being a woman in the industry at that time?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Pretty grim, actually.
Laura Madon
Yeah, I bet.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
I dress like an honorary man in a gray skirt suit and white blouse and little black ribbon around my neck. It's a sort of stood your tie. I crept around like a mouse, trying not to be noticed. You go into the staff canteen and, you know, 200 male faces turn round. Look, you got this in makeup. It wasn't funny.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah, but now I think I'm just proud of my gender, and nothing really throws me in a way. I've been to places like Saudi Arabia where, again, I'm acting as a token man. I've been treated as a token man, allowed to do certain things. But my goodness me, I covered my hair up and really tried to fit into the culture as best I could.
Laura Madon
Yeah, and I guess it kind of moves on then to the next stage of your career because you were frustrated by the lack of opportunities that there were. So you took it into your own hands and you decided to start your own software business. In the 1960s, you set up what might be considered one of the first modern social businesses you pioneered.
Laura Madon
The concept of women returning to work after a career break and supporting flexible working. What drove you to do this?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Oh, well, I was one such, wasn't I? Or, you know, and so I wanted to set up a company that was attractive to women. And so I built something that was attractive to me and assumed that a lot of other women would feel the same. And what do women want? Every survey that's done shows they want two things family friendly environment and flexibility.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah, so my company was flexible in the extreme. You could work part time, full time salary consultants, some of only we we bonded zero hour contracts we called min max contracts all sorts of new things and it became it became a differentiator and we were one of the weaknesses was that we were remembered more for, oh, that says woman company and rather than for what we could do.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
So one really had to fight that with being obsessional about what we did.
Laura Madon
Yeah, I guess it's amazing because I will say it's not fair really, to take that amazing thing that you've created and reduce it down to. It's the women only give me. It's ridiculous. You know, you're achieving amazing things with the software that you're selling and and the new working, you know, ways which actually are still new. Now, if you set up a company today that would still.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Be coming to.
Laura Madon
Yeah, it would still be, you know, So it's amazing.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
But I find that depressing that we're still talking about some of the same issues. I really do. I think the pandemic, ironically enough, this has helped to make homeworking not acceptable. And I don't think we'll ever go back to 100% office working.
Laura Madon
No, And I'm very happy for that, to be honest, because I think it means you can have a much better balance of work and life and especially for women and, you know, career breaks or maternity leave, all of these things that are much easier sometimes to deal with at home.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yes, I think also corporates are learning to deal with women in the sense of menstrual leave, in the sense of the menopausal consideration, are really looking after their staff when that's looking after staff, when there are terminations or child deaths which normally are just accepted as is, you're supposed to go back to work. But normally and this is just not, not feasible.
Laura Madon
Yeah, it's and I guess as well as there's things being done for paternity leave as well, because if we don't give men more paternity leave, it's never going to.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
They never take it. They don't take it actually. Do they want to? Well, the figures are pretty low. Really.
Laura Madon
Yeah, that's I but at.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Least it's shared. The law is. The law is that. Yeah. The law is quite fair.
Laura Madon
Yeah, I guess. Going back to your company, I mean I can't imagine it was an easy ride getting it from, you know, a small company. I think I read online that you set it up with the equivalent of like £100 today. And now, you know, it was valued at $3 billion when you sold it. You made 70 people millionaires overnight, which is, you know, very impressive.
Laura Madon
I'm curious, is there any secret to your success that you could share?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Let's be obvious. Secret. Rich Yeah, I surround myself with people who are much brighter than I am. And if you talk to any of my staff, they will confirm that. Oh.
Laura Madon
So it's I guess that emphasizes the need for good people in companies.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, and I mean entrepreneurs particularly, and I think the corporate managers also really have to have some basic skills, whatever they do and a modicum of finance. Certainly everybody needs an understanding of marketing. But h.r. If you're a manager, you really have to be able to manage people. And one of the things i really regret about business was that the more successful it got, the more it became financial rather than human humanized, the less I enjoyed it, which is not what you would expect.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
You would think success would would make it more and more enjoyable. But in fact, it forced you into a role that I didn't like.
Laura Madon
You know, you hadn't you hadn't created the company to have that type of role. You created it, too. So. Well, I was.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
I was keen to write software within a very short period of time. I wasn't writing software. I was dealing with the tax issues and the solicitors.
Laura Madon
And so, yeah, and I guess I guess coming forward to today, diversity and inclusion, do you think this is still what do you think about diversity inclusion in the tech industry today? It feels to me like it's still quite a lot of work that we've got left to do.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
There's a tremendous amount of work that's left to do. It's not bad for physical disabilities. It's very poor on base. It's appalling on women considering we are 50% of the population. I think something like 20% of the tech industry is female and it's stayed round about that despite the enormous efforts that people like myself and many, many others have made to sort of bring women in and keep women who there is an issue about that, that women are welcomed when they're young, let's say, if they're young and pretty.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
But I would certainly welcomed when they're young. But as they want to work flexibly for family reasons, that's they start to aspire to management. Well then they are really less welcome and made to feel less welcome.
Laura Madon
And I guess that that speaks to the I mean, we've got kind of a minority of women working in the tech industry, but there's an even small minority of those women in leadership positions.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Indeed. Yes.
Laura Madon
Which is. Yeah. And I guess another thing I actually wanted to ask you about was your books, because you've written a couple of books.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Oh, I'm so glad you are.
Laura Madon
I was wondering if you can tell me a bit about them.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah, well, the first one is a memoir. It was published in 2012 and revised for 2018. It's called Let It Go and there's a pond on the IT for it.
Laura Madon
I believe.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
And it's a memoir, not an autobiography in that I'm talking not I'm talking correctly, but not factually all the time. Not you know, I went to Buckingham Palace on Thursday, the third April, and it was raining, but rather much more about how I felt about things, how I felt about what I felt about losing business or whatever it was.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
So it's a memoir, not an autobiography. It's the book sold very well. It's also been translated into German and in Spanish, so it is having an impact and I aimed for it to be inspired. Rational in that act is said on every page. There's got to be something that makes you really think right. And I think I achieved that.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Anyway, there is some interesting stuff there. The second book was called So to Speak, and is quite different. It's just a selection of speeches that I've given over the last 40 years and printing them out together with some commentary and that is hasn't sold so well. But it's a beautiful book. I should have.
Laura Madon
A good time. Yes, it is by me. It's gorgeous.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
It's well, it was shortlisted for some design awards, so no comment about the content.
Laura Madon
It's I guess when you were saying about the memoir, the how the substance on every page, and that probably summarizes how you were so successful with the company because everything you've done has been substance and there's always so much behind it.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, stories people remember Entrepreneurs for Success. It's obvious to have survived, but what really distinguishes the entrepreneur is the way we deal with failures. I have had lots of failures, national failures, project failures, people failures. And the thing is how you have to get yourself up. It's passion, self-doubt and give a big smile and go out and sell the next job.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
And I don't think that's appreciated. How so-called successful people.
Laura Madon
New.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Deal has had to deal with failure. And that resilience in me comes, comes, I think, from my refugee childhood. Yeah.
Laura Madon
I think it's really important probably for listeners to hear that side as well, to hear that it's not a smooth ride to the top. And it's not.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Indeed it is not.
Laura Madon
And I think I.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Mean, you know, if it were easy, we'd all be millionaires.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Yeah.
Laura Madon
Yeah, I guess I'm also curious about. So obviously you have this entrepreneurial spirit, but you're also a passionate French philanthropist. I think back in 2009, you were the first ever government appointed ambassador for philanthropy, which is very impressive. And you've given generously to get causes primarily in the fields of autism and I.T. and in particular the change you've instigated to make more accepting and accessible place for people with autism is remarkable.
Laura Madon
I'm curious, what led to you setting up these philanthropic ventures?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, I concentrate on things that I don't care about and they're really only to information technology and autism, which was my late son's condition. And so by focusing on that, I'm able to sort of understand at least some of what's going on in the various things. What can businesses do to really attract the skills and talents of people with autism?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
At the moment, there's an estimated 10 billion a year lost on lost employment for autism. That is, people that should be paying tax, wanting to pay tax, but actually are claiming benefits. And that is something that needs to be remedied. Many autistic people have real skills that the industry needs. There is some need to explain to teams what autism is to make some slight physical amendments, perhaps to lighting or to the position of a desk or something like that.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
The only figures I've seen on the standards that retrofitting to get somebody with autism in is about costs about £200 per person, which is, you know, phenomenal noise. Yeah. One of my charity's autistic, which is medical research into autism, has 40% of its staff are autistic and its chief executive is also autistic. And he is doing great. When he was appointed, to be honest, I was a bit worried about his people skills.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
But he is. He's wonderful and he's proving to be really a valuable chief executive of what's now a medium sized organization. It employs about 25 people or something. And my biggest technical thing was I sponsored the Oxford Internet Institute. Yeah, of course. And that is from my pride and joy, really, because it concentrates not on the technology but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues that make the Internet.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
So, you know, it really is tracking what's happening into society. And there is a parallel, I think, with my original company, freelance programmers, in that it's the emphasis is social rather than technical.
Laura Madon
And I think that's I think what's so remarkable about you is that you're you know, you're focusing on these really positive changes and using the, you know, the successes that you've had to continue making this positive change.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Thank you.
Laura Madon
Yeah. So it's really I guess I mean, how has he found running these charities as opposed to a company? He's required different skills. Same skills.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Very largely the same skills, Yeah, but perhaps a different attitude. Yeah, because all the metrics are social rather than financial and business. One is so used to sort of quarterly results and so that it just suddenly gets into an organization with they have to be positive, but they're not the be all and end all. What's happening in society at the moment in the commercial world is that we stop just talking about the bottom line.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
The financial results for the Yeah talk about is second bottom line which is the social impact that an organization is having. Yeah and some organizations even talking about a third bottom line being the environmental impact. Now that's very positive but it's very business like and it certainly in philanthropy I'm doing exactly the same sorts of things impact assessments, feasibility studies.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
This is the sort of thing that one does in business and again, that it all applies insurance or pay is.
Laura Madon
It's just a fabulous, I guess, example that you've you've created this charity, but you've also shown that you've put the people who you're trying to help at the forefront of that charity. And I think that's amazing. I think that's really, really lovely. I think I mean, as a summary, you've you've just achieved a remarkable things across your lifetime.
Laura Madon
Is there one thing that you're most proud of?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
The thing that I'm most proud of, Laura, is having taken my company and took over ownership and that was the largest gift I ever made. I wasn't particularly valued. I mean, it was valued, but not really. So what it was, it took me 11 years of slog. But, you know, tenacity is one of the things that entrepreneurs have.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
And I certainly stick with it until it's a success.
Laura Madon
Really. And yeah, I think that tenacity is definitely something that we can take from this and and bring forward, I guess. Do you have any final advice for business leaders, you know, to future success and in particular women?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
I think in business you've always got to be not just innovative, but disruptive, something if you're going to do something, do it big, something that really makes a difference and then make sure it's efficient. But the important thing is that it's worth doing, doing things, doing the right thing rather than doing things right.
Laura Madon
Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think. I guess the last thing I did want to ask about, because you've been you've been called a revolutionary and I'm curious, where do you think the technology industry is going? What's the future?
Dame Stephanie Shirley
Well, the joy of the technology, of course, is that it's moving forward very fast. It'll never be a slow again. It's moving on and on. And there's no there's no end point to what you're doing will be out of date in a couple of years.
Laura Madon
Yeah, that's pretty I guess those have to say for me is thank you Dame Stephanie. Your story is truly remarkable and I think it's going to inspire a lot of the people listening. So thank you very much for joining us.
Dame Stephanie Shirley
It's been a real pleasure.
Laura Madon
Thank you. So this brings this week's episode of Tech for Leaders with results to a close. Thank you very much for listening. And if you enjoyed this, please subscribe to the series and the review to help this reach many more people and help the technology set in heart of the business community. So for now, we look forward to seeing you next time.
Laura Madon
But thank you very much. Take care and goodbye. Thank you.