Women Entrepreneur and Work from Home, 60 Years Back

Women Entrepreneur and Work from Home, 60 Years Back
Deb Prasad De (Mamu), 1977 Civil Engineering

In today’s world, both women entrepreneur and work from home is a common phenomenon. But it was not so 60 years back. In that business environment a few English housewife thought of doing something on their own. They didn’t have any capital, no capital for setting up any factory, nor any space for office. So, having no choice, let the office function from their home.

Way back in 1962, Ms. Dame Stephanie Shirley founded a company F International, aimed to develop a freelance software and systems services company in England. Interestingly, during their initial years, the gender ratio was 100:0 in favour of women.

The founding idea was to provide meaningful home-based employment for women with software skills, and later for “people with dependents unable to work in a conventional environment. The new company Freelance Programmers wanted to create job opportunities for women with dependents”. Significantly there were only three male programmers in the first 300 staff, until the Sex Discrimination Act introduced in 1975 made that practice illegal. My friend working in the group company, posted at Noida, says, during early this century, the Chairperson on every visit to India, used to ask the Indian management why the women employee percentage was so low, though compared to other companies, it was undoubtedly higher.

Looking back, F International was founded in 1962 when successful female entrepreneurs and freelance working were rare. Steve Shirley started the company despite having no capital or business experience, to escape the constraints of working as a woman in a predominantly male working context. The company was registered on 13 May 1964 and a “panel” of freelance software and systems specialists, nearly all female, began to work for the company. An early assignment came from Urwick Diebold and that immediately attracted attention from the media.
It sounded mad. “I had no capital to speak of. I had no experience of running a company. I had no employees, no office, no customers, and no reason to believe that there were any companies out there with any interest in buying my product. Nobody sold software in those days. In so far as it existed, it was given away free.” – says Dame Stephanie Shirley.
The total revenues for the first 10-month tax year were just £1,700.

By 1966, there were about 75 regular workers on the panel, later some became significant role players as technical experts and project managers. Seriously problematic projects were rare, but one in particular, with Castrol forced the management team to focus on quality management.  Since then, the quality management became one of the foundations of the operating model for the company.

Then, in 1974 the company was renamed to F International, the ‘F’ standing originally for Freelance but increasingly for Flexible and Free, too. However, in close circle the rumour was that the title F stands for ‘female’. Between 1997 and 2000 FI acquired IIS Infotech Limited, an Indian computer services company based in New Delhi; OSI – a London-based business consulting and management support services company, and Reading-based IT consultancy company Druid.
In 1988 the company was renamed again, to The FI Group, and later in 2001 as Xansa plc.

In ‘60s, there were no accessible data communication services, no internet. In the ‘70s business attracted interest from academics and futurists as example of remote services. The Harvard Business School documented the F International business in a number of their case studies. The business was the subject of several other international academic studies of homeworking.

The Cranfield School of management undertook a study of the reported differences between male and female entrepreneurs in the late 1980s, concluding that because of the differences in context and background for men and women, the principal factor for successful women entrepreneurs was the nature of market entry. F International is an early example: business and industry were short of computer-skilled people, and the nature of software and systems work was, even at that time, amenable to homeworking.

Early History
In the 1970s the company’s development paralleled the emergence of feminist thinking and the consequent awareness and pre-occupation with gender equality; together these led to legislation in the United Kingdom that was intended for equal rights to women but had unexpected consequences; F International was specifically offering employment to women, and therefore they had to adjust their policies to be gender-independent. So, Dame Stephanie Shirley says,
I felt strongly that my “female” approach, which had attracted such scorn in the business’s early years, had been vindicated, and it irked me that the state, in addition to its other meddling, had now declared that approach illegal. Still, there was no point in quarrelling with the law, especially such a well-intentioned one. At a board meeting … we amended our personnel policy again. Our purpose was now to provide employment for “people with dependants unable to work in a conventional environment.

Despite these issues, the business continued to grow until the 1970s, when it encountered difficulties for at least two reasons: the business reported its first financial loss (of £3,815) and suffered its first significant personnel loss, when Pamela Woodman resigned to form Pamela Woodman Associates, working in direct competition to Freelance Programmers. However, by the end of the decade, its revenue grew to £2.5m and there was a partnership with Heights Information Technology Services Inc in the USA. F International ApS in Copenhagen servicing Scandinavia, and F International BV in Amsterdam servicing the Benelux countries; At home, still in the 1970s, spin-off businesses were re-absorbed into the parent business which was re-established in 1974 as “F International”. By 1980 the business had developed country-wide spread with 600+ staff.

F International was a founder member of the Computing Services Association and was active in the British Computer Society and the Institute for Data Processing Management (IDPM). It was in the early 1980s that a wider general interest in remote work via telecommunications support became evident.

Although for the first decade the F International workforce communicated successfully, using the United Kingdom overnight mail service, the home working became increasingly interesting and increasingly accepted as telecommunications services became available. The F International story attracted extensive public and professional interest, for example in Tomorrow’s World (a long-running BBC science and technology programme), and several books by Ralf Dahrendorf, Alvin Toffler, Michel Syrett, and Francis Kinsman. Steve herself continued to write and speak about the business model and the benefits for the workforce. In his book “The Third Wave” Alvin Toffler included a Chapter on “The Electronic Cottage” wherein he quotes from a 1971 report by the Institute for the Future suggesting a range of occupations that could be undertaken from home and mentioning F International as one example. Toffler wrote (quoting from the IFF report):

Kudos to those women, who could introduce a system, which the rest of the world adopted after 60 years.