I am one of the UK’s leading authorities on issues concerning work-life balance, flexible working and working parents, and I have been instrumental in shaping family-friendly policy, legislation and public attitudes since the mid-90s. I am a Visiting Professor at Cranfield University School of Management, and a Senior Associate at Scotland’s specialist flexible working training and consultancy organisation, Flexibility Works.
Research and campaigning
For most of my career, I have worked with employers, researched and campaigned around how we work, and how work impacts on and interacts with family life.
From 1994 to 2018, I was Chief Executive of work-life charity Working Families, and in that role I built up an unparalleled track-record of highly impactful practical work, research and thought leadership on issues around gender discrimination at work, family-friendly and flexible working best practice, and of policy development.
I commissioned the UK’s first research on the links between flexible working and performance. I chaired and judged the Working Families annual employer best practice awards, and also chaired the Department for Work and Pensions’ Private Sector Employers Working Group on Flexible Working, which made early calls for jobs to be advertised flexibly from the off, and which advised extensively on the ACAS guidance to support the Right to Request Flexible Working.
In 2012, I established and developed the annual Modern Families Index (Working Families and Bright Horizons), which became a respected and influential survey of the impact of work on family life in the UK today.
My 2023 report for Flexibility Works, How We Work Now – The Enduring Impact of Covid Lockdown on Flexible Working, examined the practice and experience of a range of employers in Scotland and identified the particular challenge of “Me-ism” in hybrid working.
Personal perspective
As a working mother myself, I job-shared, job-split, or worked reduced hours as a sole post-holder over the years in order to retain time for my family life. I built a successful and high impact organisation on flexible principles: the staff I led and managed worked in the office, remotely, full-time, part-time and job-shared.
Honours and accreditations
I was awarded an OBE for services to quality of life issues in 2007, and I was twice recognised as a Top 30 HR Most Influential Thinker by HR Magazine.