Catherine Mayer

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Catherine Mayer is a journalist, commentator, co-founder and President of the Women’s Equality Party and best-selling author. In a career spanning staff jobs at the Economist and more than a decade at TIME magazine, in senior positions including London Bureau Chief, Europe Editor and Editor-at-Large, she has spent more than three decades covering politics, business and the biggest events of our times and interviewed many world-famous figures.

Her book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World!, was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. Her biography of Prince Charles, Charles: The Heart of a King is a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller and generated worldwide headlines with its claims of dysfunction in the royal courts. Her 2011 book Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly, exploring our changing attitudes to age and ageing, has been translated into many different languages. Catherine frequently appears on broadcast media and is a popular keynote speaker.

Speaking topics include:

  • The Future of Media in the Digital Age: During a 30-year career, Catherine saw first-hand how digital technologies initially enabled news organisations to flourish and then destroyed the economic models supporting them. Catherine discusses and assesses the repercussions not just within the industry but for democracy and our understanding of the world, as well as forecasting developments in new media.

    • Seizing the Turbulence: How to embrace change Tumult tends to make people and organisations cautious, but progress is often born of turbulence, not stability. Catherine explains why resistance may not only be futile but damaging, and how to find silver linings even in the stormiest of circumstances.

    • Tough at the Top: Hard lessons in leading and being led Catherine has been a junior employee, a middle manager, the head of departments and organisations and she is also the co-founder of the political start-up, the Women’s Equality Party. She discusses what she learned from bad bosses and good and from her own mistakes and successes about how to manage and how to inspire.

    • From Lightbulb Moment to Growing Enterprise: How to turn ideas into reality In March 2015, Catherine came up with the idea of the Women’s Equality Party. By July it was registered with the Electoral Commission. It now has 65,000 members and registered supporters and 73 branches. Drawing on this experience and on case studies she has conducted as a journalist and author, she sets out her blueprint for making things happen.

    • Difference Works: Why true diversity and inclusion is about much more than ticking boxes Organisations know they need to improve the diversity of their workforces—but they often don’t know why. Catherine unravels the confusion surrounding diversity and diversity programmes, highlights the dangers of creating echo chambers or cultures that suppress dissident opinions and demonstrates the value of more inclusive cultures.

    • Wonder Women: How unlocking female potential benefits us all This addresses some of the key points in the Difference Works keynote, but looking in more detail at the subject of female participation in the economy and the workplace. Why is it that organisations struggle to retain women and how can they improve that record? And, why the rewards of doing so are huge.

    • Inside the Royal Family Catherine spent two years researching her biography of Prince Charles and many more years behind the scenes covering the Royals. She gives insights and tells anecdotes from the strange world she dubs “Planet Windsor” and also highlights the surprisingly pervasive influence of the royals on public life.

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