Remote work offers coffee breaks when you want. Dame Steve enabled work-life balance for women.

Sunday morning paper brings another Wild Woman alert! A name we should recognize as easily as Steve Jobs’ or Mark Zuckerberg’s!  Meet Steve Shirley (because her business letters signed as “Stephanie” went unanswered). “Ridiculously ahead or her time,”(Sue Black NYTimes 8/24/25) she founded a tech company that provided the programming for the Concorde’s flight data recorder, software protocols that were adopted by NATO, and pioneered scheduling software for buses and trains. Her company’s high stakes innovative work was done by a small army of women working from home via dial-up connections. By sharing ownership of her company with her mostly female employees in the 1970s (297 of her first 300 employees were women), she made at least 70 of them millionaires; her retirement  years were devoted to philanthropy; her company eventually reached a value of $3 billion.

Dame Steve, rescued from the Nazi’s via a Kindertransport train, then attending a boys school when the local girls school did not offer advanced mathematics, and starting her own company offering flexible work hours for women after bumping against the glass ceiling of the corporate world of the 1960s while designing an early computer.  Yes, a Wild Woman indeed!

https://stevenirosenfeld.substack.com/p/a-pioneer-in-technology-and-a-giant

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/business/stephanie-shirley-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare