Tania Gandamihardja

We joined 25×25 because we believe in its mission. We do want to increase the level of representation we have on the executive committee level, but also throughout the company, and we feel that we probably can’t do it by ourselves, because getting input and sharing of best practices by other companies who are also on the same journey would help us tremendously. I think that’s one of the reasons why we joined 25×25.

I started my career a long time ago. So I did Chemistry at university. I realised that I didn’t want to spend more than 20 hours in the lab because it wasn’t just for me so I joined HR.

I’d worked for seven years in Pricewaterhouse in Indonesia. I moved to Indonesia from the UK in the mid-nineties after university, two years after university, because Asia was booming at the time, it was a tiger economy. I wanted to join in that peak.

So I joined Pricewaterhouse and then I joined the oil & gas industry, where I stayed for 23 years. And I was fortunate enough because the company that I had joined was very much a multinational company. They have always recruited people where they work because back in the 1960s, I believe, they had a visionary CEO where he had stated that if they wanted to be a multinational company, they had to recruit where they work.

So being Asian working in an Asian country for a multinational company, I had the same opportunity as a Brit would have, a white woman or a white man would have working in the UK. So I travelled around the world with that company for 23 years and it was great, it was wonderful. And after 23 years I left and joined BAE Systems.