Steve Shirley

Shirley was born Vera Buchthal to Arnold Buchthal, a judge in Dortmund who was Jewish and who lost his post to the Nazi regime, and Margaret (née Schick), a non-Jewish Viennese mother. Her paternal grandmother was politician and women's rights activist Rosa Buchthal. In July 1939, at the age of five, Shirley and her nine-year-old sister Renate travelled to Britain as Kindertransport child refugees.

She was fostered by parents in Sutton Coldfield. She was later re-united with her biological parents, but said she "never really bonded with them". Shirley attributed her early childhood trauma as being the driving force behind her ability to keep up with changes in her life and career.

After attending a convent school, she moved to Oswestry where she attended the Oswestry Girls' High School. Mathematics was not taught at the school, so she received permission after assessment to take those lessons at the local boys school. She would later recall that, after her Kindertransport and wartime experiences, "in Oswestry I had five wonderful years of peace".

After leaving school, Shirley decided not to go to university (botany was the "only science then available to my gender") but sought employment in a mathematics/technical environment. At the age of 18, she became a British citizen and changed her name to Stephanie Brook.

In the 1950s, she worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, building computers from scratch and writing code in machine language. She took evening classes for six years to obtain an honours degree in mathematics. In 1959, she moved to CDL Ltd, designers of the ICT 1301 computer.

After her marriage to physicist Derek Shirley in 1959, Shirley founded the software company Freelance Programmers with a capital of £6. Having experienced sexism in her workplace, "being fondled, being pushed against the wall", she wanted to create job opportunities for women with dependents, and predominantly employed women, with only three male programmers in the first 300 staff, until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made that practice illegal. The company was also innovative in that its employees worked part time and from home, so that they could better juggle family responsibilities; Shirley regarded the company as a social endeavor as well as a business. She also adopted the name "Steve" to help her in the male-dominated business world, given that company letters signed using her real name were not responded to. Her team's projects included programming Concorde's black box flight recorder.

She served as an independent non-executive director for Tandem Computers Inc., the Atomic Energy Authority (later AEA Technology) and the John Lewis Partnership.

Shirley retired in 1993 at the age of 60, and focused on philanthropy. She died aged 91 in a nursing home in Reading, England, on 9 August 2025.

The Shirley Foundation, based in the UK, was set up by Shirley in 1986 with a substantial gift to establish a charitable trust fund which spent out in 2018 in favour of Autistica. Its mission was facilitation and support of pioneering projects with strategic impact in the field of autism spectrum disorders with particular emphasis on medical research. The fund has supported many projects through grants and loans including: Autism at Kingwood which supports people with autism spectrum disorders to enjoy full and active lives; Prior's Court, the foundation's largest benefaction, with a residential school for 70 autistic pupils and Young Adult Centre for 20 autistic students; Autism99, the first online autism conference attended by 165,000 people from 33 countries. She addressed conferences around the world (many remotely) and was in frequent contact with parents, carers and those with autism spectrum disorders. Her autistic son Giles died following an epileptic seizure at the age of 35.

From May 2009 until May 2010, Shirley served as the UK's Ambassador for Philanthropy, a government appointment aimed at giving philanthropists a "voice".

In 2012, Shirley donated the entirety of her art collection, including works by Elisabeth Frink, Maggi Hambling, Thomas Heatherwick, Josef Herman and John Piper to Prior's Court School and the charity Paintings in Hospitals.

In 2013, appearing on BBC Radio 2's Good Morning Sunday with Clare Balding, Shirley discussed why she had given away more than £67 million of her personal wealth to different projects. In her 2012 memoirs Let IT Go, she writes "I do it because of my personal history; I need to justify the fact that my life was saved".