Kerry Dryburgh

25×25 is all about empowering women. And, you know, that’s been a passion of mine, I should say for much of my career. And as you know, Tara, I also have two daughters, one who’s 21 and one who’s 13 so for me, it’s not just about where I am today and how I can help change the face of the corporate landscape, but it’s also about really paying back for the future and for my daughters and the world that they’re going to inherit as well.

And I think 25×25, a corporate led initiative, us as organisations coming together and getting support we need is the most powerful way to change the landscape that we operate in from a business standpoint.

So I feel very passionate that this is the right way to make change, basing it on data, getting the support you need from companies is really critical, and that’s the way I like to do business. And your passion about what we’re trying to achieve and the brilliant women that we’ve got engaged in 25×25 is what gets me up and out of bed to help and I think it’s what will make us really successful.

From a gender standpoint, gender parity, I believe, is something that all companies should really aim for. But a couple of years ago that would have seemed quite a long way from where we were in our reality. In some regards we were fortunate because we are reinventing BP, and what that enabled us to do was to look at how we could completely restructure the company.

What we did was put gender at the heart of that restructuring: did we have the right people in the right roles for the business we needed for the future? But we were also able to think about diversity and put diversity very much at the heart of everything that we were doing.

That enabled us to focus on the outcomes as much as how we plan to restructure the organisation.