When Stephanie Shirley signs Steve…and wins contracts

An employer who offers telecommuting, part-time work, job-sharing, in-house daycare … dreaming of it? Dame Stephanie Shirley did it, 60 years ago. Portrait of a pioneer.

Long before millennials, this entrepreneur, born in Germany in 1933 but raised by a foster family in England, understood the benefits of flexible management. “Trusting employees to manage their own time was not only effective but much easier than trying to control every detail,” as she explains in her book Let It Go.

The birth of telecommuting

Too poor to continue her studies at university, she began working while taking evening classes in mathematics and physics. Her various jobs introduced her to software development, a field she particularly enjoyed. After several frustrating professional experiences, where her technical opinions were systematically dismissed with a scornful wave of the hand, she decided at the age of 29 to set up her own business as a freelance programmer. This seemed to her the ideal compromise between life as a mother and an intellectually satisfying professional life, with autonomous management of her priorities.

The advantage of software development at the time was that it required no resources or infrastructure: in addition to a good head, all you needed was pen and paper. You could work from home and, if necessary, hire other programmers to work from home, provided they had a telephone so they could be reached. Dame Stephanie Shirley set up her company under the name Freelance Programmers. Telecommuting was born (pdf).

A company founded by a woman, for women

Noticing how many young women with a degree in mathematics working in the burgeoning IT (Information Technology) industry found themselves automatically at home after marriage or first childbirth, she came up with the idea of recruiting almost exclusively women. They would work from home, on a freelance basis. In those days, women needed written permission from their husbands to open a bank account, and society considered it inconceivable for a mother to continue working in a company. This form of employment enabled all these women to reconcile work and family life.

An article in the press about her company describes software development as “a job that can be done from home, between feeding the baby and washing the diapers”. This form of advertising enables the company to build up a whole catalog of female freelance developers. Hiring ads speak of “careers for women with dependents”. The company boasts that it offers job opportunities to women considered unemployable by traditional male-run businesses. As a result, it is able to recruit highly talented women who are grateful for the opportunities on offer.

Flexible working, part-time, job-sharing and childcare

Few companies offered part-time jobs to women at the time. Freelance Programmers allows its female employees to work their own hours. The only thing that counts is achieving the set objectives, and organization is the employee’s responsibility.

In addition to flexible and part-time working, the company is also accepting job-sharing, in response to a couple’s request. “Why not?” was Dame Stephanie Shirley’s response. And here again, she’s a pioneer in allowing 2 people to work together on a single full-time position, leaving the 2 employees free to organize themselves.

For some employees, working from home is not an option. They come to the company’s premises, which quickly has to adapt to demand by setting up a day-care center to look after the children. While Dame Stephanie Shirley was seriously considering a proposal from one of her customers to buy her company, the day-care center was the bone of contention that brought the sale to a halt, the customer finding it an unnecessary burden for a company.

A pioneer in quality assurance too

This flexibility led the company to develop its own quality control methods, long before ISO standards. Although the programs are written by “women surrounded by babies and diapers”, as Stephanie Shirley once quipped, they are the fruit of very rigorous procedures. This is one of the company’s strengths. These standards were adopted by the Ministry of Defense, and then by NATO in 1987. And one of the company’s contracts was to write the analysis programs for Concorde’s black box.

Steve instead of Stephanie and a flight into the 2000s

But contracts were slow to materialize, until her husband suggested a little trick: sign his letters as Steve Shirley. And indeed, positive responses began to arrive! Four years after its creation, Freelance Programmers has 75 programmers working on a regular basis.

In 1975, the company was criticized for its hiring policy for “women with dependents”. Although the company employs men, they are still very much in the minority. The company changed its name to F International and began hiring “individuals with dependents”.

By 1985, F International employs 1,000 people and is one of the top 20 software companies in the UK. Dame Stephanie Shirley appointed Hilary Cropper as Managing Director. She considerably increased the company’s revenues, margins and assets, and the company became a public limited company, changing its name to FI Group and then Xansa. Hilary Cropper led the staff buy-out of the FI Group in 1991 and, as the stock market soared in the late ’90s, a hundred employees became millionaires in shares.

Dame Stephanie Shirley retired in 1993, becoming one of the richest women in England when the company was sold. Since then, she has devoted herself to philanthropy, notably for the cause of autism, which affected her son.

She gives many conferences and is in the habit of asking her listeners, with humor: “How do you recognize an ambitious woman? By her forehead flattened by the paternalistic pats she’s received throughout her career!”

Reference: Let It Go by Dame Stephanie Shirley, published in 2012 by Andrews UK publication.