Hello everyone and welcome back to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Helen Tupper. I'm one of the co-hosts of the podcast. And on today's podcast, I'm joined by Anne Franca. Hi, Anne. Hi. Anne is the CEO of the Chartered Management Institute, which is an organisation that Sarah and I have followed and taken lots of benefit and wisdom from in our careers. So I'm delighted to be

at the CMI today talking to you. And Anne is also an author of a book, also published by Penguin,

like ours. And the book is called the Create a Gender Balanced Workplace. I'm delighted that

Anne is able to talk to us as part of our series of podcasts that we're doing for International

Women's Day and really so that we're doing for International Women's Day

and really so that we can dig into gender balance workplaces and what the problems are

and hopefully what some of the things that might help us to overcome them are. So we're going to get

right into that today. But first of all, I wanted to understand a little bit about in your own

career, when were you first aware of some

kind of disparity in terms of gender? When did that first start to become something that was

visible to you? Well, it's interesting because actually my first experience of the importance of

gender balance was a very positive one and it was really something that happened by accident because

of a tough time in my own life. I was going through a divorce. I actually was in a custody suit

and I was in a full-time career at Procter & Gamble and I needed to take my daughter to school. She was

two years old and it was very important. It was simply non-negotiable. But I had a general manager who had a

meeting that started every day at nine. And taking my daughter to school meant I could not make that

meeting at nine. I would not get there until 930. And so I went to him and I said, what situation was?

And I said, look, I'm just going to have to be late. And he said, it's fine. Don't worry about it.

The first few times, I walked into that meeting quite red-faced and embarrassed. But then

everybody got used to it. So what I did with that is I paid it forward. I allowed my folks,

who were both men and women, to work flexibly. So they had different reasons. They weren't going through a

divorce. One of them played in an orchestra and liked to leave early to make practice. Another

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