The whole direction of my life has gone
from being a refugee and having an autistic child,
and those have been the two real drivers.
Well, I come from a fairly bourgeois family
in Western Germany.
And my father was a judge when Hitler came to power.
Because he was Jewish, he lost his job
and we started moving around Europe
trying to find a safe place.
It was not a good time to be Jewish.
My mother then did a very brave thing.
She organised for my sister and I
to be put on a so-called Kindertransport rescue train.
I think it was the most traumatic thing
that can happen to any child.
Five years old, not understanding what was going on,
moving to a new country with different language,
different parents, different everything,
I was so disoriented.
When I got to England, a lot of well-meaning people,
said to me, five-year-old,
"Aren't you lucky to be alive?
Aren't you lucky to be alive?"
And indeed I was, I was lucky to be alive
and I got this feeling that I needed to justify
my existence, justify my survival.
And so pretty early on, I got this rather priggish,
I am going to lead a life that was worth saving
and that has driven my life.
It continues to be active and live
and as strong today as it was 85 years ago.
I think I always wanted to be a mathematician.
And at the age of 18,
I started off as a sort of mathematical clark,
I was pounding at a desk calculator doing calculations.
And marriage shortly afterwards,
and joined a small computing company.
I just fell in love with computing,
it was absolutely absorbing.
I could not believe that I should be paid so well
for something that I enjoyed so much.
It was a wonderful thing to happen to me.
Having been patronised as a Jew.
I've then found it extremely difficult
to be always patronised as a woman.
You fight back a bit, you learn to ignore things,
you make a joke of it but eventually it does get to you.
Really almost overnight I decided I've had enough
of this sexism. I really can't stand it anymore.
I am going to try and set up an organisation
that is the sort of organisation that I would like
to work with. Family-friendly,
flexible to the extreme, ambitious.
I really knew nothing at all about business
but I did find that I had some sort of flare for it.
And it grew from just me doing the work,
then five or six people. Eventually it grew to 8,500 people.
And for years, we dissembled and disguised the fact
that it was part-time women working from home.
My idea of selling was to write lots of letters
to companies that were advertising for programmers
and got absolutely no reply whatsoever.
It irritated me, it made me more aggressive.
It made me more, you know, I jolly well show them
that I can do it.
And also I felt all the time that I was doing this
for women in general, not just for me.
I needed to survive in that big male environment,
but I also needed to make it an environment suitable
for everybody.
My dear husband suggested actually that maybe,
it is that double feminine of Stephanie Shirley
that was putting people off and suggested that I started
just signing those letters as, Steve Shirley
and surprise, surprise, it had some impact,
and I've been Steve ever since.
A little boy arrived
and suddenly we had to really refocus
our lives, our plans.
And Giles was a placid,
very easy baby.
But then at two and a half years old,
he turned to being a wild, unmanageable toddler.
He was
profoundly autistic.
He never spoke again. He lost his speech.
And the family became autistic in a way
because there were so many things that we couldn't do
and didn't do.
What we did do was eventually,
via a child that
spent 11 years in an asylum.
But I did get him out and we set up our first charity
and he finished up leading a quiet, dignified life
in the community and I'm enormously proud of that.
So my first charity now looks after 300 people
modelled on my Gilesy.
Most important things that you do in life
do not happen quickly.
Took me 17 years to get that charity
up and running and independent of me.
I'm enormously proud of it.
As a refugee,
I was consumed by survivor guilt,
depression and it's only by starting
in the philanthropic world have I been able
to let that rancour go.
I was very keen to get the company
into the hands of the staff.
That was the biggest gift I have ever given,
a quarter of the company at no cost to anyone but me.
We eventually floated.
And at our peak value, we were worth $2.8 billion.
It made a tremendous difference to many people's lives.
I'm very, very pleased that 70 of the team
did become a Sterling millionaires.
My advice to a young person today is really to focus
on something that they are interested in,
to make an impact on the world.
It is so, so satisfying and worthwhile.
You can't be what you don't see, whether you're
disabled or autistic or epileptic
or old or young.
We need all these skills and we need role models
to show that it can happen.
Success now means to me that I've got choices
to what I do, who I spend time with,
how I spend my life, the rest of my life.
And I hope it is to continue to lead a life
that's worth saving.