"The needs of our customers have underpinned everything that we have done, and are still the most important influence on our company. This belief has not only helped us get where we are today, but has also made us the only price comparison website invited to be a member of the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA) thanks to our focus on transparency and customer care."

"To succeed in business you need to be brave enough to ask the right questions and talk to the right people, it’s the only way you can learn to be better at what you do."

"I think that some women become transfixed with the ‘glass ceiling’. I’ve always thought that if you believe there is a glass ceiling, you’ll spend your life on the floor looking up at it. Anybody can be successful in any industry as long as they work hard and are nosey and noisy enough"

"If you’re thinking of starting your own online business the most important thing you can do is research the market. The internet is a fantastic tool for identifying a target market and checking out the competition."

"“I don’t feel there is at all a muttering that I’m not passionate enough about the art form"

"“I feel there is too much put on this idea of an innate collision course between your business and artistic side. They are not mutually exclusive"

"I have done a lot of work in how to handle and lead through that. I still consider that more important than a long experience of artistic administration.”"

"When I talk to our elderly patrons I say I am partly here because I want this art form to exist in 30 years and be as strong as thriving as it can.""

"I would never describe myself as an opera buff because I work with people who truly are"

"Working particularly in this building I would never describe myself as an opera buff because I work with people who truly are.”"

"Self-awareness about what you do, why you do it and when you do it, is what is so important."

"I went for a promotion."

"lt has been a bit of a journey, my career, in a good way."

"So on that basis, start today."

"I believe that the greatest threat to diversity is the belief that someone else will fix it."

"It’s never too late to start the diversity and inclusion journey."

"So I believe that diversity is the only way that you can really create competitive advantage."

"I guess with that in mind, from a leadership perspective, the motivation levels of the team and the happiness of the end customer."

"It’s really important that we get that commitment from the top."

"The tone is set by the board, by the C-suite and by everyone cascading it downwards."

"So role modelling for diversity comes from the top."

"Startups are uniquely positioned to embrace diversity and I think that’s because they are full of ideas, they have a mindset which is very entrepreneurial and their ideas can change the world."

"Let’s inspire kids in to digital, have more young women joining and staying in the tech sector & encourage diversity in the boardroom."

"Companies are more successful and profitable if they have diversity at the heart of their businesses."

"My ambition is for this country to seize its position as a digital nation of significance by leveraging its technology leadership position and growing a diverse and inclusive skills base."

"I believe that the UK can sustain its position as a magnet for digital investment and for tech talent."

"For me it’s important to know what failure looks like, after all, success is always on the other side of fear."

"Give yourself the space to be the person you want to be versus the person everyone else wants you to be."

"You are a role model whether you choose to be or not, your behaviours are copied, good or bad."

"I think they need to follow a career path that they are passionate about, whatever field that may be in"

"It can take time to find the right balance, but I would say I have always tried to “blend” my life with work, although it can be hard sometimes. If you love what you do it makes it a lot less stressful. I can often be found doing my work emails whilst watching my children on the sports field, or taking my mum on store visits with me."

"It is surprising to me that investors haven’t realised like what good deal there is to invest in female founders and continue to throw money at this."

"You don’t matter. You should be happy to just work at Starbucks. You should just be happy to become a cleaner and have a job like that. You should just be happy that you are safe. It is an additional form of re-traumatisation that happens to refugees, and there is no solution for it right now."

"We just need to be careful that we don't inadvertently prevent women from taking some of the opportunities by not being in the office when they feel it's beneficial both to their skills and to contribute to the business."

"Businesses do have a role to play in that."

"I benefited enormously from watching some really excellent leaders and how they navigated challenging problems."

"Being seen and then seeing other leaders is a really important part of development."

"We find, certainly at Nationwide... that men are more likely to come into the office than women"."

"It was only in the months that followed, that people realised the downside of home working wasn’t benefitting everyone equally."

"So many ditched the commute and extolled the virtue of flexibility and being able to balance home and work life more seamlessly."

"In the early head-spinning weeks of Covid lockdown, we were quick to champion the benefits of home working."

"We should be in a strong position to inspire the next generation of female leaders. However, our post-pandemic ways of working may deny many women the opportunities that were so important to me in my early career."

"Keep innovating and pushing the business forward because also as we found lots of competitors start cropping up and they just relentlessly copy everything you do without really bothering that they are not being different. If you just stayed the same then all of your work would be washed away so I think it’s important to keep innovating."

"I did have a lot of determination. I think you can get to a point of say eighteen months old, or maybe a year – which I think is a real danger point, because that’s when you have spent all your money – and it’s not working and a lot of your initial enthusiasm and optimism has just been ground down. I am quite good at reinventing my energy, so whilst I can get very depressed, the next day I suddenly think ‘Right, I’m going to fight this and keep going’."

"Everyone you speak to wants to run a business. It’s interesting, but everyone thinks ‘Yes, I could have done that’, or ‘One day I’m going to do that’, but not all people have got the guts to leave their job or put their savings in so it becomes a pipedream that they talk about, but you can tell they will never actually do it. So I think there is a little bit of resentment. All those people are secretly hoping that it will fail because it makes them feel better about the fact that they are still in their secure jobs."

"Women in business have just got so much positive energy and determination. It’s almost scary because they know exactly where they are going and nothing can stop them. Almost having a no-holds barred approach, nothing can stop them achieving what they want"

"I needed a third module to complete my degree and chose systems engineering, thinking that it was about computer systems,” she says. It was definitely not what she was expecting but in a good way and it moved her career firmly into the engineering sector. It is clear she now thrives on the opportunities engineering offers."

"Teachers and parents don’t see engineers in society. Most people who become engineers already have a family member in the industry"

"The general public still doesn’t see engineers in the way it does doctors or lawyers. You see doctors and lawyers portrayed on television and in fiction, but engineering only has visibility in documentary formats, so Inwed has an important role to promote the profession.”"

"It is important to remember that still only 16% of the engineering workforce are women but in society, women make up 51% of the population"