The kind of company that Dame Stephanie Shirley wanted to work for didn’t exist in 1962, so she created her own.
“I wanted a company that was suitable for me [and] that I would like to work in,” Shirley said on Nerdette. “And I knew there were lots of women who had also hit the glass ceiling and were completely and utterly ignored by the industry.”
She’s talking about the software industry, which was even more of a boys club at the time. So Shirley founded her own business, Freelance Programmers, and hired a bunch of women from IBM. She even changed her first name from Stephanie to Steve in order to get the attention of potential clients through promotional materials.
“I’d been patronized as a child,” Shirley said. “I wasn’t going to be patronized as an adult.”
Shirley told Nerdette host Greta Johnsen about her incredible life story.