Elisha St Hilaire | Aon
Executive Assistant | Aon | Diversity
I am a highly experienced Executive Assistant and have worked in a variety of different industries before joining the insurance sector.
I also Chair Aon’s Women’s International Network “WIN” which is a Business Resource Group for colleagues. Since forming the WIN Committee, we have seen the group grow organically from 60 members to 350 across the UK. It has been a very exciting journey and look forward to what the future holds in this space both internally and across the market. Last year I was able to further empower our female colleagues at Aon to realise their true potential by implementing a signature event in celebration of International Women’s Day. An idea that was born in the small confines of the WIN Committee and in which I played an integral part. The WIN – Empower your Career conference welcomed 90 colleagues from all over the UK to Old Trafford, where our CEO and business leaders shared their career journeys and answered guests’ questions on the day. The conference was a great success and has helped our Talent & Development team implement specific training to help develop our female talent pipeline at Aon. This was WIN’s biggest event to date.
Rukasana Bhaijee | EY
Diversity Coordinator | EY | Consultancy
Rukasana has been working on the Diversity and Inclusion (“D&I”) agenda since March 2013 and is very passionate about making a change in this area. In this time she has become a subject matter expert for all D&I characteristics and has delivered organisational change programmes to effect positive long term change.
Her previous role was within the Diversity team at Queen Mary University London, focusing on Gender Diversity to increase the number of women progressing in academia, specifically in STEM subjects. Rukasana successfully supported the Barts and the London, School of Medicine at the University to achieve Silver Status in the Athena SWAN gender equality charter.
She joined the D&I Team at EY in March 2015, and currently has a specialist focus on the Disability and Social Mobility Strategy in the organisation. Rukasana is working to progress the Disability agenda at the organisation to build a disability confident organisation through socialising conversations around disability in order to remove any remaining stigmas associated.
Rukasana coordinated a working group for EY success to achieve ‘Social Mobility Business Champion’ status with the BIS led government initiative. She has also completed a 5 year review of D&I Activity at EY, in order to review progress and identify future strategy.
Linked to her work on Social Mobility and the EY value to ‘Build a Better Working World’ Rukasana has worked with the YesFutures charity this year to coach four girls aged 13 to improve confidence, focus on self-development and aspire to a better future. She is also a mentor at EY and is currently mentoring an individual in the EY Smart Futures work placement programme.
Her career in Diversity has seen a return to the city after an extended career break, her background up to 2002 was in Client Services in Finance.