But I knew, as everyone now knows, that the capabilities of a computer are defined not by its solid parts but by the code that runs it - in those days, huge reels of punched tape. If a company wanted to improve its efficiency by using a computer, what mattered wasn’t the hardware it bought but the programme - the software - that told it what to do. I cannot honestly pretend that I foresaw how huge the software industry would eventually become. (The combined global market for operating systems and applications is estimated as I write to be worth around $300bn.) My motivation had more to do with the sheer pleasure of working with computers. But I also had a gut feeling that there was a programming industry of some kind waiting to be born, and I liked the idea of being in at its birth. I knew that I was good at programming, and that there was only a relatively small pool of people in the UK who were. At the very least, I thought, I ought to be able get enough freelance assignments of my own to be able to earn a living, from home, without having to be an underling in a male-dominated company. As an added attraction, such a way of working might well be compatible with raising children, which Derek and I hoped to be doing before too long.
The great thing, from my point of view, was that writing a computer programme required neither resources nor infrastructure. It was a very time-intensive business, in which the code had first to be written out as a sequence of logical commands - the difficult bit - before being converted into digital code that could be expressed as punched holes in a strip of tape. But all you needed, for the most part, was pencil, paper and a brain good enough to imagine how complex tasks could be reduced to a series of logical steps. This meant that I could work from home - or, if necessary, on clients’ premises - without splashing out on equipment. It also meant that, if all went well, I could hire other programmers, on a freelance basis, for particular projects, and they could do the work from their homes. My new company’s name, Freelance Programmers, described exactly what I intended it to do.
Several of my colleagues, told of my plan, laughed openly; I presume that the rest laughed in private. Not only was the plan mad. There was also the awkward fact that I was a woman. Whoever heard of a woman running a company - unless it was a little tea-shop, or a cottage enterprise selling hats? One or two added that, even disregarding my gender, I was surely too brittle in temperament to survive in the unforgiving business jungle.
None the less, I was determined to give it a try. There seemed to be so much potential: not necessarily for making money, but for translating the various challenges that organisations faced into problems that could be solved by a computer. Logistics, planning, management, automation - anything and everything seemed capable of being made to run more smoothly with the help of a well-thought-out programme. Anything seemed possible.
I was 29 years old, and, while I could hardly have been less qualified for the task, I did have the crucial asset of unlimited enthusiasm. Marriage to Derek had given me a sense of stability and security that allowed me to take risks. I loved the field I worked in, and I felt a bright, joyful, optimistic passion for the business that I had imagined.
Making money scarcely featured in my list of motives. If all went well, I would earn a living; if the worst came to the worst, I had Derek’s salary to fall back on while I found another job. What I wanted was not wealth but a workplace where I was not hemmed in by prejudice or by other people’s preconceived notions of what I could and could not do - a place where, instead, I could exchange ideas freely with likeminded colleagues. And in 1962 that meant an entirely new kind of workplace.
Luckily, I was in a position to create one; in fact, my lack of assets gave me no alternative. I had £6 of capital, a dining-room table, a telephone (with a party line shared with a neighbour who, luckily, rarely used it), and one other mad idea: those who worked for me would all be women, employed on a freelance basis and working from home.
I’m not sure when this women-only principle first occurred to me. It hadn’t been part of my initial idea, and, in the early months, it was hardly relevant. I had imagined that the world would beat a path to my door - I was reasonably well-known by then in what was a pretty tiny industry. But it didn’t. And when I did eventually get a contract - from the new UK division of the US management consultants, Urwick Diebold - it provided enough work for just one person: me.
But the issue of gender kept recurring. For example: I needed my husband’s written permission before I could open a bank account. (Women weren’t allowed to work on the stock exchange then, either; or to drive a bus, or fly an aeroplane.) And the letters that I eventually started sending out to other companies touting for business received so little response - not even an acknowledgement, usually - that I began to wonder if the fact that I was a woman had something to do with that, too. Almost immediately, therefore, I felt that I needed to succeed not just for my own benefit but in order to prove a point on behalf of women generally.
Then another, related issue came up. The Urwick Diebold project lasted about eight months. I got it via a former fellow employee of CDL, David Lush, who had joined Urwick Diebold some time earlier. He introduced me to a colleague, Kit Grindley, who was setting up a programming group in the company’s new computer consultancy division. The brief was to write software standards - in other words, management control protocols - for this group. This wasn’t exactly the kind of work I had had in mind for my enterprise, but it would prove immensely valuable in the long run. Programming was (and is) a maddeningly hard-to-pin-down activity, whose practitioners are notorious for claiming airily that there are “just a couple more bugs to sort out” while uncomprehending clients fret about missed deadlines. The fact that Freelance Programmers could claim to be a source of objective, written standards would ultimately prove to be a major selling-point for us, and would help demonstrate to prospective clients that we were no mere fly-by-night operation.
But the crucial thing about that first project in the short term was that, halfway through it, I realised that I was pregnant. This wasn’t exactly a surprise. We had been planning to start a family, and my dreams for our future usually included four or five children in the background. But the actual approach of a real birth date put things in a less forgiving light. Could I really cope? Could the business cope with such disruption so early on? And what would potential clients - who felt dubious enough about my being a woman - feel about doing business with a heavily pregnant woman? (“How many people do you have working for you?” my ex-boss asked me around this time. “One and a bit,” I replied; but I didn’t tell him what I meant.)
I finished the Urwick Diebold job with just a few weeks to spare. I remember visiting them towards the end of it and having serious difficulty climbing the stairs to their second-floor office opposite Victoria station. I had earned £700 from it: much less than I would have earned in that time had I remained an employee. It occurred to me that I would need to do something about my pricing - just as soon as I had dealt with the more immediate challenge of giving birth.
Probably the happiest days of my life. Giles was thriving at 3 months and we had no inkling of the problems ahead.
Giles was born on 9 May 1963, in Amersham cottage hospital. It was a traumatic, 24-hour labour: at one point a nurse complained that my screams were frightening the other patients. But Giles himself was the most beautiful, adorable baby you could imagine. It was daunting being at home alone with him for the first time, and I remember crying a lot on my first days back from hospital. But we bonded quickly - all three of us - and I couldn’t possibly have imagined leaving him with someone else in order to go and work in an office. As I didn’t have an office, the issue didn’t arise. But what about my business? Would I let it fizzle out after just one job? Or would I find a way to keep it going?
For about three months, I hardly cared: I was too busy being a doting mother. Derek would come home in the evening and ask me about my day, and I would struggle to think of anything I had done. The rigmaro
le of feeding and bathing and cuddling and playing - not to mention washing nappies and hanging them out to dry - seemed to fill every waking minute. And if I paused for a moment to gaze into my son’s bright eyes, or to contemplate the sheen of impossibly soft and delicate fair hair on his head, I wondered how anyone could ever have suggested that motherhood might be boring. For me, it was utterly absorbing, and I felt a sense of completeness that I had never felt before.
Then, gradually, my enthusiasm for work began to return: not instead of my enthusiasm for Giles but as well. Giles was not just a beautiful baby but an easy one. He ate enthusiastically, warbled quietly in a beautiful treble voice, and spent a lot of time sleeping. I found that it was relatively easy to write letters and work out proposals in between looking after his needs, and before long I felt confident that he and Freelance Programmers could be nurtured simultaneously. A former colleague at CDL asked me to do a fairly straightforward project, which I appreciated (but would have appreciated even more if they could have managed a less miserly fee). Before I knew it, I was working more or less full-time again.
Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law could understand why I wanted to go back to work. Nor could most of our neighbours. “Why? Hasn’t Derek got a decent job?” was one comment. Derek took a more practical attitude. “I understand that babies make a lot of washing,” he said. “If you’re going to be working, we had better buy one of those new automatic washing-machines.” It was the only thing we ever bought on hire-purchase - and a much larger investment than anything we had so far put into my new company. It was also one of the best investments I ever made.
Then another project came in, from a City company called Selection Trust, who wanted a Programme Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) carried out on a computer they had purchased. I was too busy with the Computer Developments project, and with Giles, to do this myself, but I hated to turn work down, so I found a freelance programmer, a very nice lady called Ann Leaming, to do most of the work for me, while I just managed the project. I paid her 15 shillings (75p) an hour, and charged Selection Trust a guinea (£1.05) an hour, which sounded suitably grand.
In fact, both projects were laughably under-priced, to the extent that it scarcely made business sense to be doing them at all. But at least we were gaining experience in new kinds of work - PERT projects, in which you analyse the tasks involved in completing various processes, would form a significant part of our future business. And at least I was no longer just a one-woman operation. My company was doing what its name implied.
By the end of 1963 I felt confident that the business could expand. In fact, I felt confident about everything. I remember looking at Giles, and thinking of him and Derek and our home and my exciting new company, and concluding that I must be the luckiest person in the world.
But feeling confident was one thing. The problem remained of how to develop the business. All our contracts to date had come through former colleagues, and these would soon be finished. There would be no more work for us to do, unless I could I somehow sell our services to the wider world. Meanwhile, the financial situation was worrying. I remember bursting into tears on receiving an income tax demand, based on my previous salary, for £600 - that is, for 85 per cent of what I had earned in the 1962-63 tax year. Another year like that and I would be ruined. Somehow, urgently, Freelance Programmers needed to expand.
I had already spent most of our starting capital on some smart headed notepaper, with the words “freelance programmers” all in lower case (partly in deference to the design trends of the day but also as a pun: we were a company with no capital). I had also taken steps to make us sound more like a proper business - and less like a cottage industry - by removing the words “Moss Cottage” from our address. I remember posting empty envelopes to myself from various locations, addressed simply to “Freelance Programmers, Ley Hill, Buckinghamshire”, to check that they would reach me.
And I had hired a local lady, Barbara Edwards, to provide half a day week of secretarial assistance, so that I could be certain that my letters would go out looking as though they had come from the chairman of a blue-chip company. She used to come to Moss Cottage on Wednesday afternoons with her own baby, and we would help one another out with childcare as circumstances demanded.
But still my letters failed to produce a response, until Derek suggested that maybe the problem lay not with the letters themselves but with the signature at the bottom of them. Given my experience with previous employers, it was not unreasonable to speculate that many potential customers, seeing the words “Stephanie Shirley” at the bottom of a letter, would refuse to take its proposals seriously, simply because I was a woman.
Derek suggested testing this theory by signing a few letters “Steve Shirley” instead. I did so, and people began to respond. I have been Steve ever since.
Around that time - on 31 January 1964, to be precise - my little enterprise got a mention in a feature in the Guardian about a strange and exotic modern phenomenon: women who worked in the then embryonic computer industry. The article, by Maureen Epstein, was headlined “Computer women” and described how a growing number of women who had decent maths qualifications plus “patience and tenacity, and a common-sense sort of logic” were finding employment opportunities as programmers. “Much of the work is tedious,” she wrote, “requiring great attention to detail, and this is where women usually score.” I’m not sure what women who read the article would have made of this analysis, but one paragraph that clearly struck many of them mentioned a “Mrs Steve Shirley, of Chesham, Buckinghamshire” who “has found that computer programming... is a job that can be done at home between feeding the baby and washing nappies. She is hoping to interest other retired programmers in joining her in working on a freelance basis.”
This unexpected piece of free publicity provoked a flurry of enquiries from would-be programmers, some of whom had worked in the industry at quite a high level before “retiring” to have children. It really marked the beginning of what would become a “panel” of highly qualified freelancers. It also encouraged a certain amount of interest from prospective clients - as did a small advertisement I placed in The Times around this time, seeking two home-based programmers and describing the opening as a “wonderful chance, but hopeless for anti-feminists”. It was hard, however, to translate these initial enquiries into firm orders. People got cold feet when they phoned and heard Giles crying in the background. I dealt with this by making a tape-recording of Barbara typing and playing it whenever the phone rang. Then there was the problem of going in to meet someone and - once they had got over the shock of discovering that I wasn’t a man - suddenly finding myself the object of unwanted sexual advances. It is hard to sell software when you are having your bottom pinched. And that is what the business world was all too often like in those days.
But bit by bit offers of work began to trickle in. The great thing in our favour was that we had scarcely any competitors. Once we could show that we were a reliable enterprise that had done demonstrably valuable work for serious customers, then even quite large companies were willing to give us a try. Several of our early clients were US businesses, who were more at home with the idea of outsourcing, and I went out of my way to target the Anglo-American market. But gradually we began to build a British customer base as well. Our revenues for the 1963-4 tax year reached £1,700 - still less than I had been earning at CDL but none the less a significant improvement.
But expansion brought headaches of its own. The fact that other people were now writing software on my behalf made me worry about public liability. What if someone’s work went wrong? It takes only the tiniest of errors in the coding to cause a software programme to work in a dramatically different way to the way intended. As the projects that came our way grew bigger - we were even in discussions with GEC about a system for a new aircraft - so the potential for making a catastrophically expensive mistake grew bigger too. I made enquiries a
bout professional indemnity insurance, and was quoted premiums that would have wiped the company out. It made more sense, I realised, to incorporate Freelance Programmers as a limited liability company. On 13 May 1964, therefore, I paid £15 for an “off-the-shelf” company registration, and the business became Freelance Programmers Limited.
This was a huge step forward. Not only did it ease my worries about indemnity by limiting our liability, but it also felt, in an odd way, like officially laying a foundation stone. That “Limited” somehow made the whole operation seem more solid, more credible, more real - both to our customers and to me.
Minute Number One in the company’s minute book stated that our purpose was “to provide jobs for women with children”. Later on, when we began to give more thought to the need for training and development, we changed this to “careers for women with children”. Later still, when I realised that many of the women I was employing were caring for elderly relations or disabled partners, it was amended again to “careers for women with dependents”. But the main point never changed: this was a company that would offer opportunities to the kind of women whom traditional male-dominated companies considered unemployable.
I don’t think I had started out with such a clear-cut social purpose. I had merely imagined a workplace undisfigured by traditional male sexism. Yet a pro-woman policy made obvious sense. Talented female mathematicians had been passing through the universities in increasing numbers ever since the War, and gaining good degrees. Many of them had worked for a while in Britain’s nascent IT industry, only to drop out - of the job and the job market - either on marrying or on having children. And, since most companies were far too rigid and male-dominated to adapt their ways of working to suit such employees’ convenience, their skills and intellectual energy had been going to waste. By committing my company to making use of this pool of untapped talent, I gained privileged access to some of the best programmers in the country. (Many came from IBM, where part-time systems engineers were simply not allowed.) Not only were these women good: they were delighted to be working for me and determined to make the most of the opportunity.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 8