Female leaders advocating for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

As part of Women’s History month, we hear the tales from Jenni Emery & Vimmi Singh. We would be delighted to hear from the community too; share your stories about how you or others around you are advocating for equity, diversity & inclusion.

Jenni Emery: I built my career in three worlds traditionally the preserve of men – law, engineering, and private equity. Books, buildings, brass … and boys. I have been in many rooms and sat at many tables, always as ‘one of a handful’, and sometimes as ‘the only’. What that experience has been like, how much I’ve noticed and how much, in truth, I’ve cared – has varied wildly over the years.

I always approach the ‘women in business’ conversation with care – in part because my career was largely built on the patience, guidance, and trust of wonderful men; but mostly because it’s such a nuanced conversation, and so often ill-informed. There are as many ways of being different as there are of being human, and we demean everyone if we deal in generalities and lowest common denominators. I became a coach because to see and ignite and honour the unique individual in every person I meet is the biggest joy of my life – and so I’m wary of lazy generalisations and blunt instruments.

That being said … One of the privileges of having knocked about for a good long while now is the shift in perspective midlife brings. As well as seeing the individual, one becomes increasingly able to see the system. And the system, my friends, is broken. It doesn’t work for the many because it was built for the few. And one of the groups it doesn’t work for is women. I experienced this first hand in my own executive career, and I see it everywhere now in my coaching and advisory work.

I see the system hurting women in the most senior roles in the world’s largest companies. I see it hurting female founders and investors. I see it hurting the very women whose voices we most need to hear. I see it hurting my daughters before they’ve even got started.

And so nowadays in all my work, I try to do three things: help women, help leaders to help women, and change the system. I try to do this across three key arenas where women need more power – in the workplace, in the wallet, and in the public square.

In my day job, I work with senior leaders, supporting them to make better decisions so that they, their teams, and the communities their businesses serve can all thrive. When I’m working with women, I see it as part of my role to help them devise the strategies and perspectives they need to navigate the system they are in. When I’m working with leaders, both women and men, I see it as part of my role to provoke reflection on how they may be complicit in a system which is failing women (and many others), and to invite them to consider what agency and capacity they may have to change it.

If gender inequity in the workplace is persistent and iniquitous, the situation for women when it comes to wealth, asset ownership and investment is diabolical. Less than 2% of VC funding goes to female founders and in the UK only 14% of angel investors are women. I coach female founders and investors and am a Forever Founder of WealthiHer, a network that promotes the economic advancement of women. I also invest where I can – the new #BeMyAngel campaign on Crowdcube enables all of us to invest in female-founded businesses with no minimum threshold – and actively seek to buy as much as I can from women owned businesses.

Finally, and perhaps most joyfully, I am an advocate and ambassador for ElectHer – a wonderful not-for-profit multi-partisan organisation working to motivate, support and equip women in all their diversity to stand for political office across the UK. In the spring of 2023, we built a coaching programme from the ground up when almost 100 female coaches responded to my request for help on LinkedIn. As a result, we were able to support all the women in the ElectHer programme who were elected to local government in 2022 and 2023, and we are ready to go with a team of coaches to support women in local and national elections later this year. We know that the coaching has been a huge support to the elected women; and we also know that the experience has transformed our coaches. It has been the most incredible privilege to watch this community form and strengthen in capacity and ambition, and I can’t wait to see what we do next. If you’d like to join us, let me know!

Jenni Emery is a member of Meyler Campbell faculty and is a founding partner at Altair Advisory LLP, the next-gen leadership advisory firm. She did the Mastered Programme in 2009.

Vimmi Singh: How can we create a fairer and higher performing workplace for women and minorities? This question has enthralled and tormented me in equal measure from the day I landed my first role in banking and has led me to many positions on boards and diversity sub-committees.

At the age of 24 years, with two post graduate professional qualifications and a board position, I found myself battling daily microaggressions and assumptions from stereotyping of women and minorities at work. I realised early in my career that it was not enough to be strong, ambitious, and resilient. The issue is disproportionately systematic and working harder in unsupportive workplaces only creates poor self-care habits. In fact, the constant need to prove oneself, overworking, difficulty setting boundaries can lead to burnout.

While healthy self-doubt can in fact be turned into positive motivation in the presence of a supportive work culture, on the one hand, bias, racism, and exclusion intensify feelings of doubt on the other.

My cultural and spiritual upbringing taught me at a young age that blaming a person, or an entity is not the solution. Rather than take things too personally, I aimed for positions of influence to create change. At each stage, I worked on bringing about structural change, through creating and maintaining gender and ethnic diversity indicators in organisations and making recruiting and appraisal systems women and minority friendly. At a personal and informal level, I coached, mentored, and nurtured ambitions of my colleagues.

Coaching is the top solution in these situations. After countless years of informal mentoring and coaching, I qualified on the Meyler Campbell programme in 2022. Armed with this exceptional training, I consolidated my skills to coach leaders formally to create inclusive workplaces and to coach women and minorities to empower themselves.

Coaching for inclusive leadership

In my various roles I have seen first-hand how workplace policies and hiring processes can unintentionally increase bias. I have seen recruiters advertising jobs to a narrow range of candidates or at select Institutions for graduate recruitment. Even when hired, I find minorities are likely to face discrimination in access to training, social gatherings, informal advice, mentoring, key projects, as well as in performance assessments.

At The Inner Circle Education Trust (ICET), where I am a Trustee, we support disadvantaged communities to access higher education. We focus on looked-after and care-experienced children and young people, and through a transformative programme, our aim is to make a material difference to the life chances and educational outcomes of these underprivileged groups.

At the other end of the spectrum, at London Business School, I sit on the Advisory Board of the Women in Business Club where we support professional and personal growth of highly accomplished female students who are current and future leaders through quality events and networking opportunities, building a supportive community for them, and advocating for more scholarships to feed the pipeline of future female leaders.

Bringing together her experience with boards, early-stage businesses, career transitions and diversity, Vimmi Singh specialises in coaching C-level executives, founders, and their teams, minority leaders and senior women through major transformations using positive psychology. Her goal is to develop her clients and help them flourish by finding their own unique brand of excellence.