Empowering women in business

At UTS Business School, we firmly believe that every young woman possesses the power to make a lasting impact on the world. To support this, the UTS Business School recently had the great pleasure of hosting a very special and unique event, Empowering Women: Unleashing Leadership, where it brought together some of Australia’s most successful female leaders with UTS students and high school students.

This dynamic mentoring event was designed exclusively for extraordinary young women where they were captivated by remarkable stories and insights of trailblazing businesswomen through engaging panel discussions, mentoring groups and networking. 

We were very fortunate to have an extraordinary line-up of successful and influential women, representing multiple industries, as the mentors share their stories and experiences on how they have carved their paths to success:   

• Lyn Lewis-Smith, CEO, BE Sydney 
• Josephine Sukkar, Founder and Principal, Buildcorp 
• Sally Loane, NED and Chairman, Chubb, Ignition Advice and Destination NSW 
• Deanne Stewart, CEO, Aware Super 
• Pip Marlow, CEO, Salesforce 
• Katie Rigg-Smith, Chief Strategy Officer, Australia & Zealand, WPP 
• Michelle Inns, COO, LGT Crestone 
• Helen Graney, CEO, Weber Shandwick and Jack Morton 
• Dr Hema Wadhwa, Remote Operations and Digital Services Manager, ANZ, Worley 

These excellent women shared their captivating stories, offered insights into their professional triumphs and challenges, and ignite the flames of ambition within our students. These students walked away inspired and with confidence, as we have seen from the feedback:

I come from a country where human rights, especially women’s rights don’t matter too much. And even if women are qualified, educated, talented, unfortunately maybe you're not seen in your country. So today was very important to me to…learn about female leadership, how we can improve our talent and how we can improve our skills so maybe someday I can pitch that to my country. I met so many amazing people…each of us are from a different country, different culture, and I learned so much from them. It was really good. 

– Mehrsa, Master of Human Resources

The UTS Business School will continue to run future sessions like this to ensure that we are opening up pathways to inspire Australia’s next generation of female leaders.

For any enquiries, contact Serena Stewart at serena.stewart@uts.edu.au