Amid the calls to "lean in" and endless head-scratching over how technology companies can recruit and retain women, the statistics — and their refusal to budge — are sober reminders that tech still has a gender problem. Women head only 3 percent of startups and represent only 20 percent of software developers.
But imagine launching a tech company as a woman in the 1960s, when tech companies — let alone female programmers — were virtually unheard of.
That's exactly what Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley did when she founded "freelance programmers," one of the U.K.'s first software startups, which was also managed and operated almost entirely by women. And no, that's not a typo; Shirley wittily printed the company's name in all lowercase because it had no capital — literally. Yet in 1996, it went public for hundreds of millions of pounds on the London Stock Exchange.
Born Vera Buchthal, Shirley fled Nazi Germany in 1939, when she was just 5 years old. Her biological parents put her on a train to England as part of Kindertransport, a rescue mission to place 10,000 Jewish children refugees in British foster care. Her foster parents renamed her Stephanie.
"The fact that I nearly died in the Holocaust means that I'm very motivated to make sure ... that my life was worth saving," Shirley said in a short documentary produced by Google. She added, "I had built a determination that I was not going to let other people define me."
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