Cambridge Judge Appoints First-Ever Female Director of the MBA
PASSIONATE ABOUT JUDGE’S COMMITMENT TO GENDER DIVERSITY
For all her operations and industry focus, she is also keenly passionate about Judge’s commitment to supporting gender diversity in business and enhancing the leadership potential of women, which makes now an especially exciting time to be at the helm. “We have an incredible platform to bring together research on gender diversity, which is a major focus of the school in general,” she says.
There’s also this year’s launch of the school-wide Women’s Leadership Initiative, a student-generated drive to enable women’s leadership and empowerment in the business world globally, which hosted its inaugural conference in June. “The initiative was instigated by the students, but it encompasses faculty, executives within the school and alumni and it reaches across other women’s networks across the United Kingdom and internationally,” Davies says.
Beyond this, Judge is expanding scholarship opportunities for female MBA students with support from the 30% Club, an organization established in the United Kingdom in 2010 aimed at achieving 30 percent women on FTSE 100 boards by the end of 2015. Judge will also sponsor the new Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Business Weekly. “Pulling all of this together means we have a foundation of activity across the entire business school,” she says. “And it is quite organic, so it will be shaped by incoming students and faculty to address topics as they arise.”
JUDGE’S GREATEST ADVANTAGES CAN ALSO POSE A CHALLENGE
Davies points to the fact that the Judge MBA is a one-year program as one of its greatest advantages. “It is transformational,” she says. “The students come out with a different outlook, it transforms their ambitions, it enhances their contributions to future employers. There is an extremely high return on investment.”
Where the business school sits within Cambridge is also an enormous asset, she says. “It’s not only the university but also the broader connections to the Cambridge community, the high-tech ‘Silicon Fen’ cluster, connections with the hospitals, small and large industries within the vicinity—it is a dynamic environment, an exceptional place that exposes students to a wealth of ideas within the business school, the university and the community.”
But precisely because it is such an intense one-year program and Cambridge has so much to offer, it can be a challenge to know how to make sure the school is giving students exposure and access to all that is going on within the Cambridge environment while still keeping a focus on the curriculum, Davies says. “I am always thinking about how to balance the intensity and all that Cambridge has to offer while making sure we give the students the best possible experience whilst they are here.”
TO BUILD ON AN ALREADY STRONG PLATFORM
“I am inheriting a really strong program and a great team of staff and students, and I want to build on this,” says Davies. As academic director she will continue to look at ways to make sure the Cambridge Judge MBA transforms its students, giving them both the technical management skills through the curriculum and the interpersonal skills they build through interactions with teammates and classmates. “We see how this transforms their outlook and contributes to their future,” she says.
“It’s also an incredibly exciting opportunity for me on a personal level,” she says. “This is a new challenge, having come from a career where I was a practitioner, a management consultant, did an MBA, worked in finance, became an academic—it’s very interesting to have a new challenge and be able to take forward a program like this one.”
