Dame Stephanie Shirley: ‘It is disgraceful that the gender pay gap reporting requirement was dropped’

Dame Stephanie Shirley still travels around the world giving speeches and talks - and compiled a volume of her speeches into a book as a “lockdown project” (James Duncan Davidson/TED)

(James Duncan Davidson/TED)

"When we started working from home, we only had the simple telephone, and we used to have to ask applicants not 'what is your telephone number', but 'do you have access to a telephone?',” Dame Stephanie Shirley laughs. "Now it seems so ridiculous, but the whole scale of everything was so very different."

Tech entrepreneur Dame Shirley arrived in Britain as a five-year-old in 1939 in the Kindertransport and went on to build the UK's largest software consultancy.

The 87-year-old pioneered working from home, recruiting female computer programmers to work remotely in the early 1960s. When establishing the business, Freelance Programmers, the entrepreneur resorted to calling herself Steve and pretending to be a man in the face of overt sexism.

Her firm, which later became the FI Group and is now part of the Sopra Steria Group, programmed the black box for the supersonic Concorde, as well as software for underwater weapons. It grew to employ 8,500 people and was valued at £2.3 billion when sold.

Today the pioneer is confident the pandemic shift in working patterns can have positive outcomes, but also warned of the need to mitigate its hit to women.

Studies have suggested up to two thirds of the jobs lost around the world since March 2020 have been lost by women, while latest City Hall analysis of Office for National Statistics data, released today, revealed that female unemployment in the capital has increased 3.5 percentage points over the last year, compared to 2 percentage points for men.

The Government suspended the requirement for companies with more than 250 employees to report their gender pay gap last year after the pandemic hit. This reporting, which only became a requirement in 2018, has now been delayed again in 2021. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has said it will not start enforcement action against companies until October.

Speaking from her home in Henley-on-Thames, Dame Shirley told the Standard: "I think it is disgraceful that the gender pay gap [reporting requirement] was dropped during 2020, absolutely disgraceful. It really reminds you how little people really care about this. Why was its usage dropped? What gets measured, gets managed."

She said: "Working from home is something that men find, now, quite acceptable. But what has happened is that women have shifted into the social patterns of the 1950s. The man works from home full stop, and the woman works from home, and does the bulk of the housework, and latterly the bulk of the schooling - which must be absolutely horrendous."

But Dame Shirley is confident the pandemic's acceleration of working online and remotely can have positive effects going forward "if managed in the right way" by business leaders, and can open up job opportunities to people with disabilities and special needs.

Since retiring in 1993 Dame Shirley has given more than £67 million to charitable projects. Back in 2009, Gordon Brown appointed Shirley the UK's first ambassador for philanthropy. Her only son, Giles, had severe autism and she founded the charity Autistica in 2004.

"Today I am working to get people with autism into jobs, making sure people are not under-deployed," she said. "If you want to employ people with autism you have to have them on trial for a week or two, to see what they can do. With the new technology this is made much simpler.

“People with autism also find certain aspects of relationships, such as eye contact, particularly difficult... At least for a person with autism, on a Zoom call they do not have to look you eye-to-eye, they can look in the camera. The technology can help in this way."

Just as companies are now realising that having a diverse workforce gives them a competitive advantage in the market, Dame Shirley said that "if we can welcome and bring in people with autism into our organisations, we can have a huge advantage".

She said: "They think about things in a unique way, they are loyal employees... Employers are aware now that this is a pool of real talent that they need to employ."

She added that adapting a workplace for a person with autism is also inexpensive. "It involves quite trivial things like changing the lights, having a desk facing the wall, not having a jazzy carpet," she said.

Today the tech development that most excites Dame Shirley is work in artificial intelligence. Her latest book, So To Speak, is a collection of her speeches from over the years published by Penguin. It was compiled last year "as a lockdown project", and all proceeds are going to Autistica.

Why is she is still writing books, campaigning and giving speeches at 87? "I was a child refugee and that is still with me, and so I really need, don't just want but need, to make sure that the life that was saved was worth saving. And so I still think 'what else can I do?'"

Tech experts’ views on moving online as a ‘democratising force’

Assuming the pandemic shift online remains at least in part in a “new normal” of hybrid working, it could allow people from many marginalised groups greater access to both jobs and crucial gateways, such as funding to launch businesses and start-ups. We asked around...

Mark Richer, chief executive of StarLeaf, a secure alternative to Zoom and Microsoft Teams serving organisations including NHS trusts, said: “As we’ve seen with the rapid vaccine rollout, there is an opportunity here to utilise new technologies - such as new, advanced communications platforms that enable a seamless collaboration for people both in and out of the office.”

Cat McDonald, investment manager at London-based tech investment fund, Albion VC, said that pitching via Zoom is “somewhat democratising access” to venture capital funding for women and minorities. She said: “You can call from anywhere, and in a Zoom pitch meeting there is probably less time for smalltalk, so you rely less on shared things. And most investors are capable of doing a higher volume of meetings doing it like this, so there is a noticeable change, and this is likely to continue going forward.”

The firm’s founder, Ed Lascelles, agreed that Zoom pitches are “inherently a bit more meritocratic”. “It is easier to set up a meeting and everything is done on a first principles basis,” he said.

Ophelia Brown has raised more than £206 million since launching her technology-focused European venture capital firm, Blossom Capital.

She said: “It is important when we have these conversations around diversity, it is important not to hang the conversation only around gender diversity... Everyone has read the article about how Zoom is going to change the world, and I think that is fundamentally true. I think there is an element of work that can now be done online.

“It is about recognising that there shouldn’t be these pointless barriers to entry. It is also about travel - it isn’t easy to work out how you are going to get on a plane and pay for it if you’re starting a company. That is one of the beauties of Zoom; suddenly everyone can have a meeting and I think that it is exciting in how it might change the landscape for investment”.