01 - Accelerating Action with Purpose-Driven Leadership - International Women's Day Special

What better way to launch Inner Alchemy than on International Women’s Day 2025? 💜

In this inaugural episode, Wendy Gardner is joined by two powerhouse leaders:

🔹 Musidora (Musi) Jorgensen, a senior executive with experience at Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle, dedicated to unlocking human potential and fostering strategic leadership for a sustainable future.

🔹 Beth Knight, a purpose-led business transformation expert and champion of social mobility, sustainability, and breaking down socioeconomic barriers.

Together, they explore:

✅ Why gender equality progress remains slow—and what’s holding women back from leadership roles.

✅ The real impact of diversity on business success and sustainable decision-making.

✅ How business leaders can commit to meaningful change before International Women’s Day 2026.

✅ A bold vision for 2030, where gender parity is the norm, not the goal.

With candid insights, personal stories, and thought-provoking discussions, this episode is a must-listen for those who believe in accelerating action for a more inclusive, sustainable future.

💜 Thank you for tuning in to Inner Alchemy: Transforming Self-Care into Global Sustainability.

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Your engagement fuels our mission - let’s create a world where self-love leads to global change. ✨

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Inner Alchemy, transforming self-care into global sustainability. Inner Alchemy is where personal transformation meets global impact. I'm your host, Wendy Gardner, a proud Glaswegian who has spent decades navigating the global corporate landscape from retail giants to tech firms.

Throughout my journey, I've witnessed firsthand how often we are treated like machines, overlooking our inherent humanity. In a world stretched to its limits, it's easy to ignore the profound connection between our inner well-being and the health of our planet. Here, we explore the transformative power of self-care, self-love, and the radical act of granting ourselves permission to thrive.

By nurturing our inner landscape, we don't just heal ourselves. We initiate a ripple effect that forces a more compassionate, resilient, and sustainable world. So sit back, relax, and join me on this journey as we delve into inspiring stories, expert insights, and practical strategies that empower you to become the change you wish to see.

Together, we'll unlock the alchemy within, turning personal growth into collective sustainability. Now, don't forget to subscribe and follow us. Well, good afternoon.

It's an absolute pleasure to have two of my most amazing women in my life and women in industry on this podcast with me. I'd like to introduce Muzzy, who's a dear, dear friend of mine, but also a dear mentor of mine and an amazing senior exec. She's worked for many organizations, namely Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle.

However, her mission, which is I think what we really are interested in today, is to create a better world where she is able to unlock potential in others and fostering a sustainable and more impactful strategic leadership. And she's really committed to people being the best version of themselves. So thank you, Muzzy, for joining us today.

What an amazing introduction. Thank you, Wendy. It's a huge pleasure to be here with you and supporting you on the amazing work that you're doing, which I know we'll talk about later, but thank you for having me.

Thank you, my darling. And then Beth Knight, another influential lady in my life as well as in the world, doing such amazing work. She's a senior exec.

She's worked in, gosh, NGOs. She's been like a huge warrior for people, always championing people and championing the planet. She's worked at FTSE 100 companies, Lloyds Bank, Amazon EY, and she's absolutely passionate and advocates for purpose-led business change.

But particularly, she is passionate about breaking down the socioeconomic barriers that are impacting UK underserved businesses and people and planets. So Beth, thank you so much for joining us today. Really pleased to be here.

So I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. Well, I mean, it's International Women's Day 2025, and my goodness, they're still talking about accelerating women into action and accelerating us to the boardroom.

I mean, we three have been working for quite some time now and definitely understand a lot around that. And I mean, it is a celebration of how far we've come. And I really think it's a great marketing tool as well because we're talking about it, which I think is amazing, which is what we have to do to bring it into the consciousness.

But I think we, there's a stark reminder that there's still a lot of work to be done, particularly around women. And I was just really wondering what you guys, from your experience, feel why we haven't progressed as fast as we perhaps when we first started out thought that we might have and why it remains, the quality for women remains so slow and what is holding us back from accelerating? So I think I'll go to Muzzy first, if you don't mind. Yes.

So look, you're right. It's a shame that we're still having to talk about this in 2025. And certainly as a mother of three daughters, one of the things that drives me is ensuring that they see a better landscape in the world wherever they are from the one perhaps that we've seen and certainly our generations before have experienced.

And it's still pretty stark. I mean, the last time I looked, I think the World Economic Forum said it's going to be at least 140 years until we see parity on gender pay and on equity across the world when it comes to roles and things. So a long way to go.

And I think one of the reasons why we're still here in a particularly telling time as we sit in 2025, because it feels, I don't know to me, it feels pretty dystopian at the moment with all of the things that we're seeing, particularly as a result of the elections coming out of the States and a lot of big organizations rolling back on a lot of the commitments that they have made when it comes to equality, diversity, inclusion, equity, all of those things, which I'm sure everybody, unless you've been living under a rock, you will have seen what's happening in the world right now. And I think it feels that there's a lot of focus that we need to bring back to the conversation when it comes to the world that we want to see. And obviously, we can look at it through a sustainability lens at the moment, given that there's still a huge amount that we need to do there to ensure that we've got a sustainable future.

But in terms of the progress that we want to see across all of the big global challenges that we need to solve, the central point to that is ensuring you've got a diverse team, a diverse board, a diverse organization focused on solving those problems. And I think the way to drive that action, we will talk about some of that as we go, is really to keep that at the forefront of all of the things that we're trying to do across solving those problems. But I don't know, Beth, what's your view when it comes to why we're not quite as far ahead as we should be? I think, I mean, the Nirvana end state here is complete parity, right? And when you're hearing it in terms of 140 years, that feels quite stark.

It didn't feel like this when I was younger in my career. I remember starting out at large multinationals and it felt more meritocratic. Yeah, you know, there were things happening around us where, you know, we weren't always as inclusive as we would have liked to have thought we were being.

And people needed to be treated for their whole selves and as whole humans, versus as a label or a gender or an identity. But I think there's no getting away from, as we think about sort of those cycles and waves of change that we see in society, it does feel like we're on a backward wave at the moment, having to sort of dig into resilience, gear up and ready for that next kind of pushback and push forward. And so in those moments where we have got things around us that are kind of carving back, whether it's being led out of US politics or it's something that's happening in a financial market, I think fundamentally for me, there's no getting away from the fact that we're overshooting planetary boundaries.

We've got some great progress that we're making around, you know, poverty levels are actually decreasing globally. There are examples in parts of the world where gender equality is getting better. And when we talk about things like International Women's Day, it manifests very differently depending on your culture, where you live in the world.

For some countries, you'll be talking about access to education, access to finance, basic human rights, where women are being disenfranchised. And then in other locations, it's around getting up to the top of the boardroom and, you know, in every facet of whatever cultural context that you're in as a woman, that point around resilience is needed, that point around allyship is needed. The need to continue keeping up your stamina and your energy for all of this is really, really critical.

It was really interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I had the real privilege of going to see Cyndi Lauper, who I, she was like my kind of 20s, like dream. It was like the Bridget Jones for me, you know, all her music.

She's such, actually, she is a real activist in her music, particularly for women. And she was saying, and she's 71 now, and she was telling her stories of why she wrote what she wrote. And she was saying it's really stark that when music that I wrote and lyrics I wrote in the 60s around women's fundamental rights are actually still so prevalent today.

She said, I never dreamt that I would be, it would be so prevalent today. And I just thought, wow. I mean, it really, really moved me.

I have to say, I was a bit, she moved every emotion in me in terms of- We were there together, Wendy. Well, not together. I was in the same place as you, not realising you were there, but wasn't it so moving? It really was, because she was one of the original trailblazers for, you know, equality and having a voice and a seat at the table.

And I think that's what it comes to. And the reason why businesses do better, you know, we can solve problems faster. We can look at particularly when it comes to, you know, organisations and what they stand for and where they want to go, outperforming when they've got diversity across the board.

And that's because you get diversity of thought when it comes to problem solving. So it's not just a tick box exercise. This is because you get people thinking in a different way when you have different points of views from people who've got different experiences and, you know, different ways that they may have come up through the organisation to help solve those problems.

So that's why it's important. It's not just a, you know, nice thing to have and it's something to say on the stats. It absolutely resonates across the whole organisation and out into the community, out into the world and then helps, you know, solve these big problems that we're all trying to solve.

That's right. Sorry, sorry, sorry. May I carry on? No, I was just going to kind of build on that because one of the many hats I wear, I teach at the University of Cambridge and the research, the business literature shows that to be very true.

I think it's very easy also to kind of get sucked into clickbait media moments, right? The actual kind of fact base around diversity, equity and inclusion conversations at the moment, it's one in eight US headquartered companies that are retrenching on their DEI commitments. It's not a global response to this and even those that are, you know, brands that I've worked at, Accenture has changed their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to sort of weights and pressure on the defence contracts that they have with the US military. At least that's my understanding.

Okay, I'm not deep in the detail of Julie's decision but at the same time you've got other organisations which are coming out really strongly. So this morning there was BBVA, a big bank in Spain that is leaning in really strongly on its sustainable finance position. Lloyd's Banking Group is doing some wonderful things and continues to do around social housing and representation, fair representation of business ownership in the UK market and that activity brings me a huge amount of hope and I think what we need to do a better job of is role modelling and sharing some of the wins more, some of the successes more because otherwise you sort of do fall into this sort of populist narrative that's played by politics rather than society and economy and I think that's a real shame.

I think what was amazing was that people, I think people are starting to rise and I think we need to give people that voice that you know Beth because I know in America and we're talking about I'm not going into politics but a huge retailer there took DE&I off their strategy. People boycotted going to those stores and of course when it hits bottom lines then suddenly shareholders then go oh, oh we didn't know you know as if things were through a board without actually knowing but it was really interesting not to get into the politics that people were walking and making action. I think people, it's a people revolution, people need to start like standing up for themselves and saying yes and no to what's right and wrong.

Going back to the kind of urgency, if you had one wish that you could make any kind of systemic change whether in policy, business or society to have the biggest impact in speeding up gender parity, what would it be Beth? I think for me it's about social mobility. So it's the ability for anyone, be them male, female, whatever colour of your skin, whatever culture you have, to be able to build a business, create a sustainable livelihood, be employed on equal terms. So creating parity through the economy for me is really critical because then how people use that power, use that influence, more people with the ability to kind of have disposable incomes and make decisions around how they want to invest that, how they want to kind of build up their community.

We see quite often where women are more empowered with disposable income, the decisions that they make more often are community-minded or family-centred decisions and that sort of plays out when you look at things like the Gini Index where you've got countries with more gender parity statistically, with more women empowered economically, wider sort of social indicators follow well. In terms of the pace question that you had, I think what then becomes critical is how that then connects with protecting the planet and planetary boundaries. So if we have a real sense of urgency then for me it's empowering more share of voice in the forums and places of power where people are making decisions around protection for the planet.

Yeah, and what about you, Masi? Oh, there's no one single thing is there. I think it all comes back to education about the importance of this stuff and I know there's many, many programmes that are trying to drive this through the world in terms of why it's important, but starting right at the early ages as to why the equality is so important when it comes to how everybody is educated in terms of their financial awareness, for example, the impact that they can have in terms of the decisions that they make, what that leads into in terms of that education piece around the impact from a climate perspective, everything that really brings it back to the understanding of what that means in terms of solving these big problems. And I think a lot of the world are seeing this as an issue that is too hard to solve and so sort of closed off to some of that education piece in terms of why it's important and the impact that it can have when we get it right.

And I think education is really critical as well, but I also think that we're making it too highbrow. You know, I think we need to start speaking very plainly and simply about things because I've just started to really think, actually, I've just started to think a lot about this, you know, about being sustainable as a human and I was thinking, gosh, and I was listening to some futurists and I was listening to some experts in this field around, you know, sustaining the planet and I have to say, it was quite, you know, they were amazing, but I don't know if the general public are quite able to connect yet and I think maybe what's kind of needed is a more simplistic way of explaining it so that people can then start to do simple things because I think at the minute it's still very much, it feels to me that it's quite unattainable for people only because we're not making it quite as simple. That's what I feel at the minute.

I think that's right with anything in life, right? If we can make it simple and we can help people understand, like, very practically and tangibly what they can do to help or make a difference, if that's a consumer choice or how they're using their vote or whatever it may be, that's massively helpful. There's a great example that came out in Ireland when they had their vote on abortion rights and every piece of polling that was done and every kind of political point of view was that the vote was going to go one way and actually it leaned towards more protection for women, more rights over their decision around whether they were going to have an abortion or not and the theory behind the whole campaign that ran there was kitchen table conversations. It was sat at kitchen tables talking to fathers and brothers and family members, people in the community, understanding, making it very real.

The lived experience and the real impact that inequality has on a person that you love and care about makes it a much more real decision that you're making. It's not then a kind of ethical, philosophical, intellectualised, abstract thing. It's a very human, real, that's sat around your kitchen table having that.

Well, I love the concept of kitchen table anyway, which I guess is what we need to bring this down to. So thanks for that. I'm going to have to quit. 

I love it. So thank you for that, ladies. But going back to everybody, you hear it quite often when you're in business, businesses are forced for change and we often hear that gender diversity, oh, it's really great and it's a great idea and it's good for business.

But yeah, leadership teams are still overwhelmingly male. And what's the most effective way to move beyond that, do you think? And also, what would force real change in executive teams? Yes, look, that's multi-layered as well, right? So there's no one silver bullet. I'm not suggesting that there is and there's lots of challenges that we've already discussed.

But I think it needs to be a conscious thing that the board want to look at how they can ensure they've got parity across everything. So that needs to be really focused all the way from recruitment to retention to talent management and ensuring that there's a sort of clear pathway for the people to be able to look at how they can manoeuvre around the business and then all come in from outside. And all of that's really hard to do.

It's not, again, not suggesting this is a straightforward and easy thing and there's lots of organisations who take that really seriously and consciously focus on simple things like when it comes to advertising for a role, making sure that there's diversity across the candidates that are going to be shortlisted because it's very easy to fish in the same pool and get the same sorts of people to come into roles and then you're sort of never changing. And I think ensuring that throughout the overall experience that somebody has working within an organisation that you're creating environments where people feel included, where they can have a voice at the table, where there's psychological safety for them to speak up because a lot of this is about ensuring that you're unlocking all of that potential that sits within the organisation of business for people to have the opportunity to step up. So it needs, I would say, really conscious focus from teams to be able to unlock all of that and then ensure that people are rising to those positions to have that diversity of thought.

What about you, Beth? I mean, it goes without saying that I agree with all of that. In danger of being in an echo chamber here with some like-minded, lovely women. But I think that even above and beyond that, what I've seen organisations do that's most progressive, it's things like getting a third party board review in place, actually getting a third party in to ensure that the discussions and dialogue at a board level is kind of setting that right tone, quality assuring the work that's happening there.

And quite often that sort of independence that get brought in that have wider experience from different sectors or can bring insights that extend beyond that board role. I'm also seeing interesting kind of shifts with factional leadership positions as well. So either where you've got sort of mid-market or smaller organisations and they're creating senior roles that are part-time or shared roles across multiple companies when there's a technical specialism or an industry point of knowledge that's needed.

So I'm seeing that with CFO roles, Chief Sustainability Officer roles I'm seeing that with, CMO roles to an extent. And so having that ability to sort of work flexibly is also a way that we see women being able to sort of rise at more senior levels. The things that I think where things go wrong on the parity front is where we start to layer in loads of training programmes.

That always drives me nuts. I think education is important and communication is important but not at the expense of putting resources towards tackling toxic masculinity, looking at whistleblowing, actually looking at how we are incentivising the right work cultures and exiting those that any individual, irrespective of gender, that don't display those sort of kind of behaviours that kind of stand in line with an organisation's values. And that for me is where the rubber hits the road because if you're doing all of the right things but not addressing the uncomfortable parts of an organisation's culture where radical candour and sort of fast action is needed, then we're not really moving forward at the pace that we're needed because some of those kind of unacceptable behaviours sustain, right? Yeah, and I think... Sorry, Mosley, did you have...? You go ahead, Wendy. 

Go ahead. Because I was really impressed. I saw an advert on LinkedIn actually for a job which was called Chief Happiness Officer.

And I said, oh, what's this? And I was reading all the spec. And then it was Stephen Bartlett. He was hiring for that.

And I thought, well, how beautiful is that? You know, he's even just gone to that kind of basic of what we are as humans, right, is we want to be happy. And I really admired that he took that bold statement because what I've recognised from coming out of corporate world is I am absolutely full of corporate jargon. And I'm full of these big, beautiful terms that I've learnt.

But actually, because I've been recruiting lately and some amazing women have come into my life and yet they've been intimidated by my job role description because, of course, I've got all this blah, blah, blah corporate jargon in it. And when I speak to them about the job role, they have so many transferable skills that they could definitely do the job I need. But I didn't know how to communicate to them without having a chat because my written communication was very different from my engaging conversation around let's explore what you do, what I mean by this.

And I'm just really conscious that maybe we're keeping that diversity out of the workplace in these big corporate firms because we're not necessarily paying the attention to, you know, we've got this kind of culture going on that's a bit intimidating, actually, for some people. But, yeah, they'd be fantastic because they keep you really real and you're on the ground. I mean, that's happened to me recently as well.

I was recruiting into my team and there was a candidate I thought would just be phenomenal, and it was a woman. And she talked herself out of the role. It wasn't anything with the opportunity or the process.

And it was a very inclusive team and wonderful group of people that would only want to set anyone up for success. And the individual self-selected out about 75% of the way through the process. Language on the... Because there's a great study.

We'll have to find it for the show notes. But there's a great study that shows a lot of the language in the job adverts are predominantly masculine. I just want to be honest.

I see that partly right. But we'd run the job description through an AI and looked for inclusive language tickers and everything. But it was skill set terms.

It was things like engineering experience, data and analytical, bent, blah, blah. Things that the individual perhaps associated with, I don't know, not with themselves, whereas what I'd seen and the evidence and examples that the individual was giving, they were definitely capable of doing the role. When you think about what that then means, you see the stat a lot around a male would apply and be comfortable with being 80% competent of the job role and stretching in, whereas a woman will want to be 120-130% of the job role before they're ready for it and self-slowing progression and these sorts of things.

So sponsorship, allyship, others helping to pull them up and cover it, it's important. It's so interesting. I remember when I was sort of relatively early on in my career, there was a job role coming up that I was sort of noodling around, you know, a bit like you just said, Beth.

Well, I've done that and I haven't done that bit. It took a mentor of mine, a guy, to say, for goodness sake, Muzzy, I can tell you a guy would not be thinking about this. He would just be going for it and gave me a lovely gentle boot up the bum to go and get on with it and apply.

I got the job and it was all. But, you know, there was a sort of, I don't know if that was a sort of conditioned thing in me or a female, you know, well, I can't possibly go for it unless I've got all of the things ticked. But I think that sort of going for, you know, out of the comfort zone sometimes is important.

And so I know we all spend a lot of time mentoring people coming up through various organisations, but it's, you know, that's one of the things that I really try and instil in people. And I have to remind myself still at times, you know, go for it. But it's that, you know, having some of that mindset of, oh, I'm not quite ready or, you know, that term of engineering, whatever it is, the example we had, Beth, that puts me off, is holding us back a lot of the time when, you know, I'm sure when they do this.

You said to me, oh, I think someone else will do it better. And I've heard that before as well, you know. Yeah, it's such important work.

I think someone else will do it better. Oh, what a shame. What a shame.

It really was. You know, then I've had the other opposite effect as well, though, because I've applied for a role that the recruitment people have told me that I was overqualified for. And luckily I was at a stage of being quite confident in my, what I wanted in my life.

And I think that also matters, being quite confident. And I was like, well, actually, I want to apply for that. And they were like, would we rather you apply for X, Y, and Z because of your experiences? And I was like, no, I don't have experience here, so I'd love to do that role.

And I ended up having to go through a network connection of mine to get the interview because sometimes people make these assumptions about people without even talking to them. And so therefore, again, we're excluding people from our own biases, right? Yeah, it's true. And I think the more senior you get, the more time poor people are, the busier they are.

I've worked with some phenomenal people who, you know, they think they're making a decision in service of what they assume that you want. And yet we're all very unique, different individuals with different needs and desires in our lives. And even with the best of intentions, it's the wrong thing to do.

Listen, ask people questions, and then prioritize where you're putting your time. Yeah, definitely. So I want to move to another question, which says, we know that women, especially women of color, LGBTQ, and marginalized backgrounds face additional barriers.

And, I mean, Beth, I know that this is something that's very close to your heart. And how do we accelerate actions in an inclusive way that lifts these women? I mean, we've been talking, like, we're getting to this subject, but what do you think around that? How would we accelerate? I mean, you can sort of come at it as stats in a math problem in the sense of, like, the more points of intersectionality and difference that you have from an incumbent group, the harder it can be to progress or move forward or make change for a number of different reasons. It can be for personal resilience reasons.

It could be from, like, socioeconomic structures around you. It could be that you don't have access to the networks or the opportunities that other individuals may have had. And I think in those contexts, that's why diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are so important, because it's about breaking down those barriers doggedly and systemically trying to understand what is happening.

Sometimes it even just goes back intergenerationally, right? And so that's not an easy thing that you're going to solve overnight. There's whole disciplines around organisational psychology which are seeking to address this. I think, time and again, I'm not a fan of people that put labels on others, and identity is such a personal thing, and even how much of somebody's identity that they're willing to share at any given point of time.

So I found the thing that cuts through again and again, it's culture, it's openness, it's engagement, it's opportunities for 360 feedback, whether that's with customer, whether that's with investors, whether that's with employees. Those lines of communication, coming back to your point around music, the words that we use matters. The frequency of words and time that dominate in a conversation from a female perspective versus a male, versus a white person or a black person in a conversation, really trying to understand what the dial is that you're trying to move and the way in which you can do that.

There's lots of behavioural nudges that you can read about that people start to use. So if there's anybody listening that has the opportunity to host board conversations or senior leadership conversations, always invite a woman in a group to speak first. Always make sure that there's equity in the conversation that's being used.

Don't be afraid of clarifying with language if something's too technical and doesn't seem to be understood by the group, or if people are starting to talk in jargon. That's a problem because that's creating insider-outsider dynamics that we don't want to be doing. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, Beth.

I mean, my father always used to say to me when I was a child, you know, better to be a fool for a minute in all your life, just ask a question. But we seem to be really, really scared sometimes when we're in those environments to do so. So I suppose it's like, how can we shore people up to be confident and to feel validated when they're in those? I think that's the role as leaders, that we need to show vulnerability as well, that we don't have all the answers.

And, you know, there's gaps in our knowledge when it comes to areas that we still need to be learning about and asking the questions. Because I think, you know, we've all been in the rooms where there's one person speaking and that's all they ever, you know, nobody else gets the airtime because this is the direction we're going in and it's not really a sort of conversation. So I think that recognising that, you know, everybody needs to have their voice heard and as leaders, having the space for people to be able to have that point of view or encouraging that is really important.

And in some of the best, you know, rooms that I've been in, you know, the leaders who really get that and understand it's their role to create this psychological safety, where people can say the thing that they might think is silly but might be the one thing that is the tiny, you know, part of the puzzle that was missing and it's their point of view that needs to be heard for that. But so often I see, you know, in a lot of the organisations that I've been in previously, that some of that's in the pursuit of the thing, whatever it might be, some of that gets lost and then it's really hard to row back from, you know, making people feel that they can speak up. Yeah, do you know what? I had that experience years ago and it's been very rare actually that I've had a leader who has really had the empathy towards my situation and I was leading a massive programme of work and I was exhausted and I was called to the board because, you know, the finance director wanted to, you know, have a real strong conversation with me and I was praying on the way down, by the way, to this meeting going, please help me be open and engaging because I'm exhausted and I'm about to say, just take a drop back and I'll leave.

It's like, I was really, really tired. And I walked in and you always had one pager. It's always a one pager and they only have like 10 minutes to capture the, you know, so I went in, put my one pager down and the finance director was sitting like this.

I could feel him waiting to pouse. And my body language must have been so much like, oh, I'm just like this woman's bull. And one of the leaders in there said, and turned his paper face down and he said, Wendy, thank you so much for coming today.

He said, now, what can we do for you today? Well, I nearly like, I was like, wow. I said, leadership. I said, because actually I'm getting so many blah, blah, blah.

And I went into what? And he went, we can do that. And he was surely pleased and he's like, we can do that. And the finance director still wanted to speak.

And he said, we can pick this up later. Wendy, thank you so much. You're doing a tremendous job.

And he really read my body language and how, he could obviously see how exhausted I was because I probably looked exhausted. But there's not enough of that, I think. And so to your point, Matthew, I think that really reading the room, reading who you're asking and watching your people.

So maybe there's a lot of training that senior leaders need to do that's slightly different to the, as you said, Beth, all that normal training that's, you know, there's not a bunch. I would argue people know this already and maybe they don't, but I would say it's very different from knowing it to doing it and being it as a leader, actually being empathetic, actually listening, actually, you know, being curious or whatever it is. Because I think very often there's a, you know, and it's a lot of the reason why we've got to the point we have with the climate crisis is the pursuit of the thing, you know, be that profits, growth, you know, being the number one most amazing company in the world.

A lot of the difficult things that you need to be able to manage and sort out in order to ensure that everybody's got the voice and the seat at the table gets lost in the pursuit of whatever it is. And so, you know, gets put on the, it's too difficult to do or we're going to knock it on the head. And so we're going to go through this duration.

But, you know, as we said at the beginning, this is a systemic problem. And so there's no one single thing that sorts it. But I do think one of the key areas is, you know, this sort of transformational leadership that we all need in terms of the people who are helping change the world that we see is a better one for enabling everybody to be part of it is really, I think, the key.

I think we absolutely need that. And I think where there are examples of strong leaders that are doing that, we need to celebrate them more. We need to celebrate them to make it more of the norm.

Harvard Business Review wrote a piece, I think it was a year or two ago, about something called glass cliffs. We've all heard about glass ceilings. But I found glass cliffs fascinating as a concept because it was basically showing post-COVID-19 pandemic, et cetera, there was a wave in a positive rise of female leadership in a moment of crisis.

So that sort of mono-incumbent, alpha-dominant, driving to goal had taken us to the cliff edge. And then those leaders weren't transformative leaders. They didn't have holistic thinking.

They weren't able to kind of operate in systems and complexities and crisis response. And then you saw a big rise in more women being given the opportunity in rising up, in taking leadership at moments of crisis where kind of people skills, soft power, et cetera, was really needed. And the article was basically saying, well, that's proven that it's possible.

It's proven that it's not a lack of skill. It's not a lack of ability that's inhibiting women from being at the top. What is it about these glass cliff scenarios? Let's not wait until we're at the point of crisis or that we've overshot a planetary boundary or whatever it may be where we have more transformational leaders at the top.

And whether that transformational leader is a woman or a man, it's the characteristics that they embody that is really, really critical. So that's the future that I'm hoping for. And we'll continue to champion.

Ziving for it. Absolutely. I definitely want a future like that.

So that brings me on very nicely to the next question, which was, if we are all serious about accelerating action, what's the one thing that every business leader should commit to doing before the next International Women's Day 2026? Margu? I would say, look, if there's one clear thing that a leader needs to know is look at the data. So we can't make any decisions until we know what is happening. So that would be a good starting point is so that we can narrow the gender data gap, whatever gap it is, but have a really good understanding of what is happening and then build a plan to get to where you want to be.

But you can't do that from not knowing what's happening. So that would be my key thing is know what you're dealing with and then build a plan around it. Building on that, if we assume that the person knows and sees what needs to be done, I think the point for me is then about building personal conviction and resilience around the change that they need to drive.

And so knowing yourself as a person and what you need to do that and building that into your day, whether that's time for reflection first thing in the morning to make sure that you're prioritising the right things as a leader, whether that's putting accountability mechanisms around yourself, giving another individual, be it your partner, a coach, someone that works with you, the permission to kick you on the butt every now and again. Build what you need around yourself as a leader to give yourself the support system and the impetus for change at pace. That's really critical.

Yeah, I think that's really important that they do it themselves crystal clear, that you really do it themselves so that they're really grounded before they then go into that really important position. And I also think what would be quite fantastic is for a lot of them to start really thinking about the we as opposed to the I, you know, because I think when I've been in an organisation that really originally was about we, and then as soon as they changed to I, which was we wanted to be 10 billion, oh, you could feel like it took a while, but the whole of the culture changed. And I think we need to have very strong leadership to know that that's when it's not to do that, because that's when people become really, that's when we make people really small, I think.

So, yeah. And then coming up to our last and final question, so I want you both to imagine that we're in 2030, so go to 2030, and we've successfully accelerated gender equality. And what does that look like? What would the world look like for you, Beth? I think we would have turned our overshoot on planetary boundaries back in the other direction.

And I think we will have done it in a way that is mindful of the impact of climate change on everyone in the planet and not just those with the resources to affect the change. Muzzy? And to build on that, you know, I think where everybody is caring about the impact that they have on, you know, having the sustainable future. And part of that I come back to is, you know, the education piece and seeing that we have got to a point where we, particularly when it comes to the climate crisis, we've got more women coming through the STEM routes and focusing their efforts on being part of the solution at the, you know, from that perspective, because I think that the gap is narrowing.

But, you know, for the next five years that we've got, I'd love to see that that is, you know, on a par with where it should be for solving the problems that we need to see. Thank you. And I think that despite, you know, we've got all this tech and we're able to connect globally, I think we're just more disconnected than we've ever been to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet.

And I really think that really coming back to thinking as humans and connecting as humans and caring about each other, I think is so important. And I think we've lost a lot of that. So that we is really important.

And I think we can achieve that if we really, really want to. I think it's something that we should be focusing in on. Well, my dear mentors, friends, warrior woman that I absolutely adore, thank you so much for giving me your time today.

I am so delighted. And you have been, just for me personally, you've been a huge impact in my life, both of you. And I have to say that I don't, this is what matters, is that woman supporting woman.

And I have been supported through my career and through my personal stuff by you two. And I want to say, bring on more. And, you know, it's to thank you.

Thank you. And thank you. Thank you, Wendy, for having us and for the continued work that you do in the world.

So keep it up. Thank you, guys. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Inner Alchemy, transforming self-care into global sustainability.

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