TED Talk video. She founded a software company in the UK in 1962 and became an early pioneer of women’s rights in the workplace, recruiting women who had left work to get married or have children. This was at a time when, as a woman, she “couldn’t work on the stock exchange, drive a bus, fly an airplane, or open a bank account without [her] husband’s permission.” She faced so many challenges with regard to her gender that she started going by “Steve” instead of “Stephanie.”
“When I started my company of women, the men said, ‘How interesting, because it only works because it’s small.’ And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, ‘Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest.’ And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I’d made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, ‘Well done, Steve!’”
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