8.20AM | Registration open & Networking Breakfast

Brilliant conversations start to happen before the agenda starts. Arrive ready, grab a coffee, and find your people. The day ahead will move fast: this is your moment to settle in, make connections, and meet the people you'll still be talking to long after the closing drinks. The real work of Women in Work begins here.

8.50AM | CEO Perspective: Why Keeping Women in Work is Everyone's Business

As Channel 4's first-ever female chief executive and now CEO of Superstruct Entertainment's 80-festival empire across 10 countries, Alex Mahon knows exactly what it takes to lead at the top of a male-dominated industry. But she's all too aware that work doesn't yet work for everyone - and like all of us here today - she refuses to accept a world where talent leaves the workforce simply because of gender. In these sharp five minutes, Alex will show us what's possible when women don't just enter the room, but thrive, lead, and - crucially - stay.
Alex leads one of the world’s leading live entertainment companies, operating more than 80 music festivals across Europe and Australia, including Germany’s Wacken Open Air and Barcelona’s Sónar.
She joined Superstruct in 2025 after nearly eight transformative years as CEO of Channel 4, where she made history as the first woman to lead a major UK broadcaster and successfully defended the organisation’s public ownership through two privatisation attempts.
At Channel 4, she drove the shift to a digital-first public service media company, building the UK’s largest free streaming service and dramatically expanding impact across the nations and regions. A passionate advocate for equitable representation, she has championed women’s health at work and disability inclusion throughout her career.

8.55AM | Women of Impact: The Leaders Changing Work in Practice

Talk is easy. Strategies get written, commitments get made, and progress gets announced. These women are actually doing it: using their influence, their platforms, and their power to create measurable change and reshape the world of work for the women who come after them. A conversation about what real impact looks like when intention stops being enough and action takes over.
Alex leads one of the world’s leading live entertainment companies, operating more than 80 music festivals across Europe and Australia, including Germany’s Wacken Open Air and Barcelona’s Sónar.
She joined Superstruct in 2025 after nearly eight transformative years as CEO of Channel 4, where she made history as the first woman to lead a major UK broadcaster and successfully defended the organisation’s public ownership through two privatisation attempts.
At Channel 4, she drove the shift to a digital-first public service media company, building the UK’s largest free streaming service and dramatically expanding impact across the nations and regions. A passionate advocate for equitable representation, she has championed women’s health at work and disability inclusion throughout her career.
Her path spans science, technology, and the creative industries. She began in Physics before earning a PhD in Medical Physics from Imperial College London, later leading global production powerhouse Shine Group and software firm Foundry. She also serves as a non-executive board member of Chanel Inc., bringing together creativity, technology, and business leadership in her role transforming live entertainment experiences.
Iris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. A behavioural economist, she combines insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organisations and society, often through a gender and cross-cultural lens. She is the author of the award-winning What Works: Gender Equality by Design and co-author of Make Work Fair. Iris advises governments and companies around the world on embedding equity at work

9.15AM | The CEO Glass Ceiling Tracker: What’s Actually Changing at the Top

Progress, stagnation, or something more complicated? This new data on women reaching the highest levels of leadership provides a clear-eyed, evidence-led look at where genuine change is happening, where it's stalling, and what the gap between intention and reality still looks like at the very top. A data-led look at what is really happening when it comes to women reaching the highest levels of leadership. This session will examine where progress is being made, where it is stalling, and what the latest evidence tells us about the pace of change at the top. Get ready for a clear-eyed conversation about leadership, representation, and the structural barriers that still remain.

9.40AM | A Moment With Mariella: Why the Companies Winning on Gender Will Win on Everything

One question has driven Women in Work from the beginning: what would work look like if it actually worked for women? Mariella Frostrup focuses on the challenge, raising the stakes; and reminding the room why getting this right matters not just for women, but for business, for the economy, and for the kind of future we're all trying to build.

9.45AM | Through the Glass Ceiling: Mariella In Conversation with Róisín Currie, CEO, Greggs

Roisin Currie’s path to the top wasn't a conventional one: 20 years in HR at Asda, then over a decade rising through people and operations roles at Greggs, before becoming the company's first female CEO in 2022. In this session, Roisin will talk candidly about what it actually takes to lead a business where two-thirds of the workforce is female, but most of them are on shop floors and in bakeries working fixed shifts, not flexible hours – it’s a very different reality from the hybrid-working conversations dominating most boardrooms. Expect honest reflections on visibility, scrutiny, resilience, and the practical realities of building flexibility for people who can't simply log on from home; and why she still believes the unglamorous route – people, operations, retail floor – is often the strongest training ground for the top job. She discusses the scrutiny that comes with being a "first female CEO," plus her advice for the next generation of women aiming for the top job.

10.20AM | The Progress Playbook: Measuing the Small Steps that Make a Mighty Difference

Forget the moonshots and the grand transformation strategies. The research is in - and it turns out the most powerful breakthroughs in gender equity are often hiding in the smallest, most overlooked decisions. The positive meeting culture. The sponsorship conversations that actually happen. Flexibility that exists beyond a policy. Drawing on new research insights from Ipsos, Women in Work, and Octopus Energy, this session reveals what the marginal gains actually are, and how organisations can start making them today. A powerful reminder that meaningful change is often built through incremental behavioural shifts that add up over time.

10.45AM | Coffee & Networking Break

A chance to continue the conversations sparked by the morning sessions, reconnect with peers and meet speakers, partners and fellow guests.

11.20AM | AI and Opportunity: Who Gets Access, Who Gets Left Behind

AI is creating the biggest shift in working life in a generation. New roles, new skills, new routes to influence and earning power... And new ways for existing inequalities to quietly entrench themselves if no one is paying attention. This panel asks the question too many organisations are still avoiding: within your workforce, are women getting equal access to the training, exposure, sponsorship and opportunity that AI is unlocking? A forward-looking conversation about how organisations can help ensure women are part of the future of work, not left behind by it. The technology is neutral. What we do with it is not.

12.00PM | CEO Perspective: Why Healthy Women Means a Thriving Business

Half the workforce has a body that medicine spent decades ignoring and workplaces spent decades designing around. The result? Billions lost annually to presenteeism, attrition, and underperformance, not because women can't do the work, but because the conditions for doing it were never built with their biology in mind. This fast-paced keynote makes the case plainly: when women's health is taken seriously, from menstrual health to menopause, fertility to midlife, businesses perform better. Healthy women are a business imperative.

12.05PM | Women’s Health as a Business Strategy, Not a Benefit

Menstruation. Fertility. Pregnancy. Menopause. Midlife. These are not niche wellbeing concerns or sensitive HR edge cases: they are lived realities shaping the productivity, retention, progression and participation of half the workforce, every single day. This session makes the case that women's health is not an optional extra or wellbeing add-on. In reality, it sits at the heart of retention, participation, productivity and progression. This keynote reframes women’s health as a serious business issue, exploring why organisations must better understand and respond to the realities that shape women’s working lives, through all its stages.

12.30PM | Breaking Barriers, Building Futures: A Conversation with Cherie Blair on Ambition, Resilience, and the Next Generation of Women

12.50PM | Networking Lunch

A longer break to refuel, connect, and continue the conversation across the Women in Work community.

1.55PM | The Generation Game: Beyond Stereotypes to the Age of Inclusion

Five Generations. One Workplace. Now What? For the first time in history, our workplaces are home to five generations: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z - each bringing their own perspectives, experiences, scars and strengths to the table. And soon, Gen Alpha will be joining the party too. The headlines love to play up the clashes. This session is interested in something far more powerful: what happens when we stop pitting generations against each other and start unlocking what they can offer one another instead. Four women. Five generations. One honest conversation about gendered ageism, invisible experience, underestimated youth, and the skills we lose when we fail to build workplaces that genuinely value every stage of a woman's working life. What holds each generation back? What can they give each other? It's time to find out...

2.30PM | The Employment Rights Bill: What Leaders Need to Know

The rules of employment are being rewritten, and the changes that matter most for women at work are buried in the detail. This is your sharp, no-jargon guide to what's actually changing, what it means in practice, and where the real implications lie for how organisations attract, protect and retain female talent. Short, focused, and genuinely useful. Come prepared to take notes.

2.35PM | Competing for Talent in a Rewritten Workforce

Women aren't asking for more. They're asking for better, and increasingly, they're walking away from organisations that can't deliver it. Trust, flexibility, genuine progression, support through different life stages: these are no longer differentiators. They're the baseline. This panel explores what forward-looking employers are doing differently to compete for female talent: and why the organisations that keep losing women at key moments are running out of time to figure it out.

3.25PM | Financial Power: The Lifetime Impact of Today’s Decisions

Every career decision a woman makes today is a financial decision she'll be living with decades from now. Pay gaps compound. Pension gaps widen. Caring breaks leave marks that never fully disappear. This session joins the dots between the everyday choices: the part-time arrangement, the salary not negotiated, the promotion not taken: and their real, long-term impact on women's financial independence and security. Economic agency isn't a benefit: it's the whole point.

4.50PM | Closing Remarks

This is not the end - it's a starting pistol. Mariella will run through the themes of the day, the ideas that landed hardest, and issue a challenge to carry them back into every boardroom, HR strategy, hiring decision, and conversation that follows. The summit ends here, but the work it asks of all of us does not.

3.00PM | Coffee & Networking Break

An afternoon pause to reconnect, reflect and continue conversations before the final run of sessions.

3.50PM | Politicians in the Hot Seat

It's 2026 - what has actually changed? Mariella puts government and opposition under the spotlight, on the gender pay gap, on parental leave, on pension inequality, on the pace of progress, and asks the questions the workforce can't afford to keep waiting for answers to. This will be a bold and unrelenting session, not to be missed.

3.20PM | The First Paycheque Problem: Where Inequality Begins

The gender pay gap doesn't begin at the boardroom. It begins at the very first salary unconsciously coded by gender, the starting point that quietly sets the trajectory for everything that follows. Female breadwinners are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the UK, yet the foundations of financial inequality are being laid before most women have even found their feet. This session asks the question too few think to ask early enough: if we want to close the gap, why aren't we starting at the beginning?

4.20PM | Through the Glass Ceiling: In Conversation with Dame Carolyn McCall, CEO, ITV (and current president of Marketing Society)

Dame Carolyn McCall is the rare executive who has been chief executive of three very different organisations: Guardian Media Group, easyJet, and now ITV. Unlike most career CEOs, McCall didn't come up through one industry: she moved from newspapers to aviation to broadcasting, starting her career as a marketing planner at the Guardian and working her way up through sales, with no aviation background when she was approached to run easyJet. On stage, she'll talk honestly about what it actually takes to build a career as a serial CEO rather than a one-time appointment; the skills that transfer between industries, the ones that don't, and how she built credibility each time she moved sectors. She'll also discuss the often-overlooked role of sponsorship: the Chairs and Boards who backed her, took a chance on an "outsider," and opened doors at pivotal moments, and what good sponsorship actually looks like in practice, beyond the word being a buzzword. Expect reflections on being one of only a handful of female FTSE 100 CEOs, what's genuinely changed since, and her honest advice for women who want a career built on repeat top jobs.

5.00PM | Closing Reception: Cocktails, Canapés & Conversation

The agenda is over but the conversations are still buzzing. We keep going with an opportunity to continue the chat informally, celebrate the day, and deepen connections across the Women in Work community.

A day packed with inspiration - and real momentum.