On International Women’s Day, I want to begin with gratitude.
To the women who love and have mentored me, who advocated for me in rooms I had not yet entered. Who showed me that leadership can be thoughtful, principled and quietly powerful. Who normalised ambition without apology. To my mother, my safe space, my refuge, my role model and strong but careful advisor from the start. None of us builds a career alone. I am truly blessed to walk with a collective and continuing wisdom and support.
I didn’t grow up around board tables, academic gowns, or professional networks. I grew up in a disadvantaged area, and no one in my family had been to university.
I became the first in my family to enter Higher Education. I completed two degrees and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to study in Australia for my Master’s in Education. This cemented to me the transformative power of education. It was an experience that widened my academic world and my sense of possibility. Then came the hard work of developing and establishing myself.
I worked relentlessly inside the Higher Education sector, and have learned culture, governance, regulatory frameworks, risk, quality, and the politics that shape institutions. I built expertise through learning, getting things wrong and right, substance, delivery, and evidence, and drawing on the people kind enough to mentor, advise and champion me.
I have navigated spaces where I was the only woman at executive tables and in decision-making discussions. I have had my insight and authority questioned and overlooked, only to hear the same points from a male voice applauded. I have replayed meetings in my head, wondering if I was “enough.” Imposter syndrome does not evaporate with experience, but I am pleased to note that it does become something you learn to out-argue with evidence, and that doubt becomes quieter.
Eventually, I stepped outside the system and built my own consultancy, Applied Inspiration. For over ten years now, I’ve led a successful business supporting Higher Education providers across England who need rigorous, ethical, and practical solutions. That journey required tenacity, resilience and unwavering ethical standards.
And then, four years ago, a different leadership challenge arrived. I became a mother. Rewind to (nearly exactly!) a year ago, I became a mother again.
No board role or consultancy contract quite prepares you for the recalibration that comes with motherhood. The time pressures, emotional expansion, the sheer logistical gymnastics…. And the identity shift! Wow.
Here is what I have learned so far. Motherhood is not a professional liability. It is not an apology. It is not a weakness to be managed. It is a dimension of leadership.
Becoming a parent has sharpened my clarity, my efficiency, my boundaries, and my sense of what truly matters. It has strengthened my strategic capability and has deepened my empathy while reinforcing my decisiveness.
Yet culturally, women are still nudged to apologise for it. To downplay ambition, soften success, to act grateful for the ability to “balance.” I hope in my own organisation our mothers feel none of this and instead feel recognised, heard, celebrated, supported.
It is not indulgent to want a thriving career and a thriving family life, nor is it unreasonable to expect recognition and progression alongside parenthood. It is not radical to choose both. We should not have to shrink one part of ourselves to legitimise another.
You can build a business.
You can sit at senior tables.
You can deliver rigorous, ethical, high-stakes work.
You can raise children.
And you can do it with pleasure, pride, and success.
Not perfectly. Not without fatigue. Not without doubt. But without apology.
My career has been built on three principles: tenacity, practical solution-creation, and my commitment to my values in advancing social mobility and equality of opportunity through education. Motherhood has not changed those. If anything, it has strengthened them.
So, for International Women’s Day, here are four things I would say to women navigating Higher Education, and especially those building something of their own.
1. Don’t wait to feel ready. Act, then refine.
Confidence follows evidence of your own capability.
2. Build substance, not just visibility.
Expertise, integrity, and delivery will outlast performative leadership every time.
3. Protect your standards, especially when you are tired.
Clarity of purpose, ethics and quality are long-term assets. Guard them fiercely.
4. Never apologise for choosing both.
Ambition and motherhood are not contradictions. They are complementary strengths.
So I end with a thank you to my little girl, who has strengthened me again over the last year and for whom I dare to be.