Dr Anino Emuwa | 40 Outstanding Global Women 2023

Working in an international context and gaining international experience throughout their career is now of vital importance for women leaders. It is also critical for de-risking enterprises around the world as we shift to a more ESG-driven business model.

Economist, former banker, and holder of multiple governance positions in divers organisations from higher education, business and advocacy bodies, including the Institute of Directors (IoD), Dr Anino Emuwa is collaborating leading and inspiring others in this critical space and making change happen.

Dr Anino Emuwa is also a global business leader, honing her thinking and practice through leading universities, one of which-Nottingham Trent University-she is now serving as a governing board member alongside her other roles, including action advisory board member of the Reykjavik Global Community-Women Leaders.

Born in Nigeria, she has lived in six countries and is bilingual in English and French. Dr Emuwa completed her Doctorate in Business Administration at Nottingham Business School. She holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. She also holds a BSc Economics from the London School of Economics, is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute and a member of the Institute of Directors.

Campaigning and influencing

This impressive academic CV coupled with her successful career in the finance and corporate world underpin Dr Emuwa’s current work around improving female representation. “We are at a time where we are facing a global crisis,” said Dr Emuwa in a recent interview with France24, “In face, economists will call in permacrisis. And this is a time where we need to have all the talent abroad in order to help solve problems, particularly in leadership.

“We’re coming out of Covid and haven’t sorted out its’ effect yet. We’ve been dealing with the fallout from Afghanistan, also from Ukraine and global recession.

There are so many challenges that are facing the world right now. We need to have the best talent on board.”

A key aspect of Dr. Emuwa’s work today is championing change and building a global network of men and women engaged in making a positive impact and changing mindsets around what is possible. One of these networks is 100 Women@Davos.

“As a student of economics many years ago, I’d always heard about the World Economic Forum and I never imagined I would be invited to attend,” explained Dr Emuwa. “But I did attend. And what I found in this conference centre with 2,500 people was that it was mainly men and not very many women. It was when another woman came up to me to speak to me and then you know there was a third.”

“We know the talent is obviously equally distributed between men and women. And not having sufficient representations means that we’re losing out on dealing with the challenges and problem solving.”

Keynote speaker at our 2023 Think Women event Inspiring Global Women for Growth, at the IoD London

Normalising women in global leadership

As Dr Emuwa’s articulates and explores in the previous article, ‘Blueprint for a new, more inclusive workplace’, unconscious bias remains an ongoing challenge. This is why every story told in this celebration of outstanding women, leading internationally is so important- and why connecting and collaborating to support systemic change is viral.

“What we see with the data, it tells us that actually the perception of women as leaders is not very positive,” said Dr Emuwa in her France24 intervew. “In fact, the trend is downwards. So, we need to spotlight more women so that we normalise the fact that there are women as leaders in finance, in economics, in all fields and that it’s normal.

“The second thing we need to do is to make sure that we bring them together. We find that when  you have the power of community, when you have more women together, people get attuned and aligned to this because without realising it, both men and women are biased because we are used to seeing power as being [in hands of] men. So, we need to normalise the image.”

Supporting each other is also fundamental to bringing about change and absolutely what Dr Emuwa embodies as a leader. “We need to have access to the decisions that are being made behind closed doors. We need to get women into those rooms. We also need to get them into the informal networks, which is very often where contacts and appointments are made at senior level. It’s not about filing the application: it’s about the people who know you.

“What we’re doing is trying  to create a workplace that is more attuned to women.”