Stephanie Shirley

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Dame Stephanie Shirley at her 80th birthday party (2013)

Dame Stephanie Steve Shirley CH , DBE , FRSA (born 16th September 1933 as Vera Stephanie Buchenthal in Dortmund ) is a British entrepreneur and philanthropist German origin.

Life

Vera / Stephanie at the age of 11

Vera Buchthal grew up with her sister Renate, who was four years her senior. Her father Arnold Buchthal was a district judge in Hamm . Her grandmother Rosa Buchthal was the first woman to be elected head of department and later city councilor, and a street in Dortmund was later dedicated to her. After the handover of power to the National Socialists, her father was dismissed from civil service as a Jew, so the family moved to the mother’s home in Austria . After Austria's annexation in 1938, his father was briefly arrested for racist reasons. In July 1939 their parents sent Vera and Renate from Vienna to England on a Kindertransport . During the trip, Vera's Kathe Kruse doll, Ruth , that her mother had given her, was lost. In England the girls lived with a foster family that had agreed to take in persecuted Jewish children. Her parents also managed to escape to England. Renate moved in with her mother, Vera stayed with the foster parents. Her father entered into a new marriage and, after the end of National Socialism in Germany, was employed as a lawyer for the indictment in the Nuremberg trials . He later worked as a senior public prosecutor in Frankfurt am Main until he was replaced by the former National Socialist Heinrich Anton Wolf in 1957 for political reasons and deported to a judge's office in Darmstadt .

In order to distinguish herself from her German origin, Vera was addressed in England by her middle name Stephanie. She took British citizenship at the age of 18 and signed up as Stephanie Brook. During her school days, she was the only girl admitted to the local boys' school to take mathematics lessons. She found this school education in natural sciences insufficient and later deepened her knowledge of mathematics in an evening school. She decided against studying because she was offered a job in the statistics department of the Royal Mail (Post Office). There she developed successful software, but received no promotion opportunities from superiors. At the age of 26, she married Derek Shirley, a technician, and took his family name.

Software company FI

In 1962 she started her own business with the software company F. International Group . “I was laughed at because I was a woman and wanted to sell software,” she said in 2014. In her company, she only hired women and promoted career opportunities for women with children. The F in the company name was therefore often misinterpreted as 'feminist', but was legally registered as 'freelance', since all software developers except for a handful of employees were freelance. In order to be accepted in the male-dominated IT world, Shirley used the male first name Steve ; it is still addressed that way today. In 1963 their son Giles was born. With the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, the preference for women was no longer possible in Great Britain from 1975 onwards, and they now had to employ men as well. In the mid-1980s her company had about 1,000 employees and sales of £ 7.6 million. Her son was diagnosed with autism , which was a burden for the parents from the start. When he was in his teens, they had to put him in a home.

In 1993, she retired from what would later become Xansa , handing over operations to Hilary Cropper, who became the UK's highest paid businesswoman. In the course of the years before the company was sold to the French Steria Group, Shirley had transferred approximately 26% of the shares to the employees; it was one of the first employee shows in the UK. The 2007 sale grossed her £ 150million, making her the UK's third richest woman. The company was transferred from the Steria Group to Steria Mummert Consulting . Shirley served on the boards of directors of Tandem Computers (1992 to 1997), of the John Lewis Partnership from 1999 to 2001 and of Korn / Ferry from 2001 to 2004.

philanthropy

She has been doing charitable work since 1993 . She donated £ 50,000,000 of her property to charity through 2010; To this end, she established her own foundation in 1996, the Shirley Foundation. Her son Giles died in 1998. She takes special care of those affected by his illness, autism and Asperger's syndrome , and supports the work of the physician Simon Baron-Cohen .

Several sessions in the British Parliaments dealt with her engagement, such as the one in the House of Commons on May 16, 2000:

"The [parliamentary autism] group is being generously sponsored by the Shirley Foundation - it is proper to place that support on the record and to acknowledge the generosity of the foundation and its founder, Dame Stephanie Shirley."

Shirley initially received the OBE in 1980 , in 2001 she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire . She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath in 2006 and from the Open University (Milton Keynes) in 2009 . She was the first woman to head the British Computer Society . In 2018 she became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum . In 2017 she was accepted into the Order of the Companions of Honor .

She lives with her husband in Henley-on-Thames and has a view of the regatta course . In 2012 she published her memoir under the title Let IT Go - let go .

Her Käthe Kruse doll, which was lost during the Kindertransport, was later found again. She is in the London Museum of Childhood , her Star of David in the permanent Holocaust Exhibition of the Imperial War Museum , London.

literature

Web links

Commons : Steve Shirley  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sebastian Borger: Success has its price , Interview, in: Frankfurter Rundschau , November 14, 2015, p. 14 f.
  2. ↑ Oral history of British science: Shirley, Stephanie (Part 1 of 15) , British Library (English), accessed on May 22, 2014
  3. ↑ The man has to go . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1957 ( online ).
  4. ^ Johann Laux: Crusade for women . In: Die Zeit , 21/2014 of May 15, 2014, p. 34
  5. ^ Susanne Kippenberger: Interview with Stephanie Shirley. June 4, 2019, accessed November 26, 2019 .
  6. ↑ See also Shirley Foundation at the English Wikipedia: en: Shirley Foundation
  7. ↑ UK Parliamentary Papers, Commons Sitting of Tuesday 16 May 2000, 1:30 am, Dr. Stephen Ladyman (South Thanet)
personal data
SURNAME Shirley, Stephanie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shirley, Steve; Buchthal, Vera Stephanie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British entrepreneur of German origin
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund