Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley (* 1933 as Vera Stephanie Buchthal) faced early challenges when her father, like Curt Bloch, a lawyer in Dortmund, was banned from practicing his profession after the Nazis came to power. In July 1939, Vera and her sister Renate were sent to England on a Kindertransport from Vienna, where the rest of her family survived the Holocaust. At the age of 18, she became a British citizen, and in 1962, she founded the F. International Group, a software software development company whose corporate culture addressed inequality in the workplace by hiring primarily women. Since 1993, she has been active in philanthropy. In 2001, she was honored as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
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