Secret Leaders

Dame Stephanie Shirley, known as ‘Steve’ for reasons explained in the podcast, escaped Nazi persecution before founding a software startup in 1962 with just £6 which provided employment to hundreds of women when they weren’t taken seriously in the workplace. “I remember selling a six figure software project to a junior minister, and he was trying to pinch my bottom. It was very hard to maintain a sort of professionalism.”  Steve’s story is one that reminds us both how much the world has moved on since the early days of her startup, and sadly how little has changed. “I can't believe how today we're still talking about the same sorts of things that I was talking about 50 years ago: feeling undervalued, women’s ideas taken and presented by men as their own, women being talked over, women being patronised, women being sexually assaulted.” From coming to England on the Kindertransport in 1939, to falling in love with mathematics, being appalled at pay inequality, founding her own company (Xansa plc, now part of th