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

"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.