[SIGCIS-Members] Steve Shirley obit

[Abbate, Janet]

Steve Shirley was a force of nature, and also very generous with her time with historians. She demonstrated the economic advantage of not disciminating against women or people needing flexible work, lessons that unfortunately were not learned by the industry at large.

You can find the transcript for my interview with Shirley here:
<https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Dame_Stephanie_(Steve)_Shirley>
Oral-History:Dame Stephanie (Steve) Shirley<https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Dame_Stephanie_(Steve)_Shirley>
ethw.org<https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Dame_Stephanie_(Steve)_Shirley>
[logo.png]<https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Dame_Stephanie_(Steve)_Shirley>

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate
Professor, Science, Technology and Society
Virginia Tech
liberalarts.vt.edu/sts
Co-director, VT National Capital Region STS program
Author, Inventing the Internet and Recoding Gender

On Sep 15, 2025, at 3:36 PM, Hicks, Mar (avg5bd) via Members <members at lists.sigcis.org> wrote:

Hi all,

Agreed—Shirley was a very interesting player in the software industry. She focused on hiring many of the women being forced out of their jobs in computing in the 1960s and onward, as I talk about in Programmed Inequality<https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535182/programmed-inequality/>.

If you’re interested in reading more about Shirley and the gender and labor dynamics at her company, a preprint of my recent chapter in Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick’s new edited collection is below. Notably, Shirley saw the broad societal importance of work from home accommodations in high tech long before most others in the industry: https://marhicks.com/writing/Hicks-BabyAndBlackBox.pdf

For a 3 min summary on bsky, see here:
https://bsky.app/profile/histoftech.bsky.social/post/3lx2veouoa22o

She definitely had a long, fascinating, and important life.

Best,
Mar



________________________
Mar Hicks
Associate Professor
School of Data Science
University of Virginia

marhicks at virginia.edu
marhicks.com<https://marhicks.com/>

Research Affiliate, Centre for Democracy and Technology<https://www.mctd.ac.uk/>, University of Cambridge
Member, Scholars' Council, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry<https://www.c2i2.ucla.edu/>, UCLA
Associate Editor, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing<https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an> (feel free to ask me about submitting an article if you work on a topic related to computing history)

Books:
Programmed Inequality<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality>: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017)
Your Computer Is On Fire<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/your-computer-fire>  (MIT Press, 2021)
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