Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley CH DBE FREng FBCS  is an entrepreneur turned ardent philanthropist. An IT tech pioneer, she started her first company Freelance Programmers in 1962 with a capital of just £6 and built it into a software development powerhouse. Her life story is one of perseverance and determination in the face of incredible adversity; from being whisked out of Germany on the  Kindertransport train in 1939 at the age of 5, to being a child refugee cared for by foster parents and the difficulties she faced working as a female engineer, to the challenges she experienced as a female CEO and as the mother to an autistic child. I took the title for this article from her book ‘Let IT Go: The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley’. Dame Stephanie has amassed many incredible achievements, often in spite of the roadblocks that were placed in front of her by the male-dominated society. In her book she writes about being a young woman in London in the 1950s when the ‘pea soup’ fog was so dense that it was unsafe for a woman to walk alone late at night, 'There was almost an assumption, in those days, that an unaccompanied woman who bumped into a man in such conditions would be raped". Dame Stephanie was one of those women who worked late and being a problem solver she dealt with this potential threat by taking self-defense classes, commenting in the book, ‘It’s always reassuring to know how to knee a man in the groin.’ This example epitomizes the adaptive, tough and determined spirit of Dame Stephanie Shirley.

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