Rachel Morris is a professional accredited business coach with nearly 20 years of coaching experience working with a wide range of professionals.
Over the last 10 years, she has focused on how coaching impacts the parental transition, working with hundreds of working parents as they juggle the arrival of a child, and the looming prospect of these two worlds – work and family – colliding.
Rachel is also a working mother of two young children just over a year apart, returning to work when her firstborn was 6 weeks old. She has hard-earned personal experience of the transition working mothers experience, too.
Workplaces want to retain women, and many women want to work AND have children. Too often both workplaces and women lose out as the juggle proves too hard. Rachel is committed to supporting and empowering this ‘lost population’ – women who have spent years focusing on their profession before having a family and who still want to have a career after having one – through every aspect of her work.
Dr Janine van Someren is a professional transformational coach with a PhD in Life Story Research and a Master’s in Applied Human Science. Her research uncovered how the high-performance habits of elite women tennis players at Wimbledon were translated into life beyond the court, forming the foundations of transformative habits for midlife women.
With over 25 years of experience as an academic and corporate consultant, Janine has dedicated her career to promoting sustained health and wellbeing. Under Janine’s leadership, her company, The Wellbeing Advantage, has successfully delivered corporate wellbeing programmes for Fortune 500 companies and Fortune Global 500 companies including NASDAQ, Stryker and Unilever.
Janine’s work has been featured in various national media outlets, including RTE Radio 1, The Business Post, and Newstalk ‘s “Alive and Kicking” with Clare McKenna. She is also a sought-after speaker and podcast guest, delivering talks on positive psychology, mental health, women’s health, and stress management. Janine’s expertise in wearable technology and its application in corporate wellbeing programmes has made her a key opinion leader in the field and she continues to stretch her influence presenting research on the impact of AI on wellbeing to international business networks.
Janine’s passion for wellbeing was ignited by her own experiences as an athlete, where she witnessed the impact of high-performance demands on mental and physical health. She has firsthand experience of the challenges facing midlife women, as she balances roles as wellbeing consultant and entrepreneur, overcoming depression, parenting teenage boys and navigating multigenerational care.
Lauren Neal is a champion of gender equity and career progression within STEM. Originally from Aberdeen, Scotland, Lauren was named one of the UK’s top female computing students at age 18. She gained a Masters degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and has spent over 17 years working with men and women offshore, onshore and onsite on multimillion-dollar projects across the UK, Angola, Trinidad, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.
Chartered through both the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the Association of Project Management (APM), she is a certified IC Agile team facilitator and coach focused on improving team dynamics for optimal project delivery.
Lauren won WeAreTheCity’s Rising Stars award in the Energy & Utilities category, WeAreTechWomen’s TechWomen100, and named in Diverse In’s ‘130 Women Who Break the Bias List’. She writes and speaks regularly on gender equity in STEM.
Daniela Florea is an entrepreneur turned executive coach and a seasoned educator with over three decades of international experience spanning technology, higher education and leadership consulting. She began her career by founding and scaling a data analytics company to 90 employees, earning recognition as ‘the toughest entrepreneur in Europe’. Daniela holds an MPhil in Management from Cambridge Judge Business School, where her research focused on cross-cultural success factors in leadership. This unique background – combining business acumen, psychology training, and pedagogical expertise – fuels the depth of Vitruvian Woman.
As a strategic advisor and coach, Daniela has designed and delivered leadership development programmes for corporate clients. She has been a featured speaker at high-profile forums such as the Women in Banking & Finance UK, Cambridge Women in Tech, the Rising Women Leaders, MBA and the EMBA programmes at the Cambridge Judge Business School, the Financial Times NED Director Programme addressing topics of executive presence, leadership, cultural intelligence and digital transformation. Daniela’s engagement with the concept of executive presence began as early as 1995 with her academic dissertation and has continually evolved through decades of working with high-achieving professionals. She also led the Leadership & Collaboration agenda for the EU’s Digital Cities initiative, deepening her expertise in multicultural leadership and change management.
Based in Cambridge, England, and active across Europe, Daniela brings a global outlook with a distinctly British voice. Having reinvented her own career across disciplines and cultures, she writes with empathy and authority about the challenges mid-career women face. Vitruvian Woman distils her mission to help others ‘design their persona for success’ – a philosophy she has applied in coaching women to lead with confidence, authenticity, and lasting impact.
Anna Meller is the UK’s leading work re-balance expert. She works with ambitious professional women seeking to balance corporate career with family life. Based on 25 years’ coaching and consulting experience Anna has developed the PROPEL model which forms the heart of this book and which is designed to empower women to make choices that work for them and their employers. So they progress their careers and their employers retain key talent.
Anna has an MSc in Occupational Psychology, is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and a founding member of the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology’s working group on work-life balance. Her early working life involved a series of line HR roles mainly in Financial Services.
Since 2002 Gill Ereaut has pioneered the commercial application of language analysis to tough organizational challenges. Leading the UK-based consultancy Linguistic Landscapes, she focused on the vexed question of how to define and diagnose corporate cultures so they can be understood, managed and helped to evolve.
Throughout her first career in market research, Gill became curious about how organizations talk and why it might matter. Each client company’s shared language seemed to sustain a powerful internal world view – one often at odds with that of their customers, but strangely resistant to new information. She wanted to make these internal organizational worlds explicit and conscious, to reduce their obstructive effects.
This led her to discourse analysis and, over 20 years, she developed commercial processes to apply these academic ideas and tools to common business problems. She works with organizations across the UK, Europe and North America including British Airways, HMRC, American Express, NHS, Roche, British Red Cross, Oxfam GB and GlaxoSmithKline.
Donna Whitbrook is an experienced corporate consultant, people developer and coach.
Her extensive corporate background spans finance, training, consultancy, performance improvement, governance and strategy.
She has held senior positions in Banking and Finance and Board level positions in the Public and Third Sectors. Her key strengths being turn around of underperformance, service delivery and relationship management.
Donna is passionate about helping businesses to transform the performance of individuals and teams enabling them to reflect the brand values of the organisation and to create outstanding customer service.
She believes that, in today’s world of work, being competent and doing a really good job is simply not enough. Today we have to have the ability to create impact and maximise our personal presence in order to be positively memorable. Being a brand ambassador for our business and being able to engage with others confidently in order to build successful, professional relationships is key to outstanding performance.
Shefaly Yogendra, PhD is an independent non-executive director with experience of professional manager and owner led businesses, a range of ownership structures from listed to LLP, and several sectors including financial services, asset management, energy, higher education, professional services and technology. Shefaly has also chaired ESG, Remuneration, Nomination, and Audit & Risk committees. Her well-rounded board experience follows a career in technology, most recently as the COO of an AI company. She was invited to advise the government on the UK’s AI strategy and serves on the Enterprise and Fundraising Committees of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Shefaly helps make emerging technologies understandable and business-relevant for boards and executives alike, and is a popular keynote speaker and podcast guest on themes such as AI, investment, decision making and risk. Her keynote on bullying on boards at Chartered Governance Institute’s flagship event remains their most popular rewatched talk. Her podcast appearances include Enter the Boardroom’s ‘Decision making in boardrooms’ and Beyond the Algorithm’s ‘Are boards ready for AI?’. Since 2017 she has been a committed pro bono speaker for Speakers for Schools.
Originally trained as an electronics engineer, Shefaly has further studied management and technology policy, finishing with a PhD in comparative political decision making at the University of Cambridge.
Shefaly was named one of the FTSE ‘100 Women to Watch’ in 2016, the year she began as a Board Apprentice on the board of a JP Morgan fund board which she was subsequently invited to join
Sally Kemkers is a seasoned R&D and product innovation leader with a rare ability to uncover deep user needs and translate them into commercially successful products. She co-founded Untapped Innovation in 2012 after a 17-year career at P&G, where she held senior R&D and Insight roles across the UK, Germany, Japan, and Dubai. Sally is also an active angel investor and supports the next generation of innovators through non-profit collaborations.
Suzanne, Sally, and Deirdre are founding partners of Untapped Innovation, a global consulting and training agency helping R&D teams at companies like PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever, and Reckitt develop breakthrough products and tell product stories.
The trio met at Procter & Gamble, where they built deep expertise in user psychology, product insight, and commercial strategy. Their diverse backgrounds—Suzanne’s scientific PhD, Sally’s consumer insight skills, and Deirdre’s experience in manufacturing and marketing—helped them bridge R&D and business functions. At P&G, Suzanne and Deirdre created the “Technical Product Story” framework, now used globally as a springboard for product communication. Since 2012 at Untapped Innovation, they continue to optimize tools for breakthrough innovation. They are also co-founders of STEM Untapped, a non-profit connecting underrepresented students with STEM mentors. Regular speakers and award winners, they’ve been featured in The Independent, Investing.com, and Business Insider.
Suzanne Allers combines deep scientific expertise with a rare talent for creating compelling product stories that drive business success. With a PhD in Chemistry and a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge, she spent 15 years at P&G and created the pioneering ‘Technical Product Story’ methodology. As co-founder of Untapped Innovation, she helps R&D teams connect science, technology, and emerging human needs. Suzanne is also a committed STEM advocate.
Suzanne, Sally, and Deirdre are founding partners of Untapped Innovation, a global consulting and training agency helping R&D teams at companies like PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever, and Reckitt develop breakthrough products and tell product stories.
The trio met at Procter & Gamble, where they built deep expertise in user psychology, product insight, and commercial strategy. Their diverse backgrounds—Suzanne’s scientific PhD, Sally’s consumer insight skills, and Deirdre’s experience in manufacturing and marketing—helped them bridge R&D and business functions. At P&G, Suzanne and Deirdre created the “Technical Product Story” framework, now used globally as a springboard for product communication. Since 2012 at Untapped Innovation, they continue to optimize tools for breakthrough innovation. They are also co-founders of STEM Untapped, a non-profit connecting underrepresented students with STEM mentors. Regular speakers and award winners, they’ve been featured in The Independent, Investing.com, and Business Insider.
