Professor Susan Vinnicombe CBE | MA PhD FBAM CCMI Professor of Women and Leadership, Cranfield School of Management

Susan held the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Endowed Chair in Women’s Leadership at Simmons College, Boston, USA from 2013-2016.

Her research interests focus on the lack of women in leadership and specifically on corporate boards, women’s leadership behaviours and the issues involved in women developing their executive careers. Susan and her co-authors produce the annual Female FTSE Board Report, which she launched in 1999. Susan was named in the HR Magazine Most Influential Thinkers, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 and has been inducted into the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame in 2021. Susan is Dean of the Fellows of the British Academy of Management and has been presented with the Richard Whipp Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Academy of Management. She was a member of The Lord Davies Steering Committee on Women on Boards between 2010 and 2015, the Advisory Board of the Sir Philip Hampton/Dame Helen Alexander Review on the lack of women in the executive pipeline, 2016-2021 and Sir John Parker’s Review of the lack of ethnicity on FTSE 100 boards, 2017-present. Susan was awarded an OBE for her Services to Diversity in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2005 and subsequently awarded a CBE for her Services to Gender Equality in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2014.