Gender Advisory Council: Sarah Churchman

Sarah Churchman is a human capital director with PwC UK, with over 22 years' experience gained within the professional services sector. She has been responsible for developing and overseeing the UK firm's diversity approach since 2001.

Until recently, Sarah was also responsible for the firm's award-winning Student Recruitment Programme, which was voted number one for six consecutive years in The Times' Top 100 Graduate Employer Survey. She is currently a member of the Confederation for British Industry’s Equality & Diversity Forum as well as of the European Conference Board's Diversity Council.

In 2006 Personnel Today ranked Sarah 28th in the magazine’s list of most important people in human resources. In 2007 and 2008 she acted as a judge in the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and the First Women Awards. She is frequently quoted in the press and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today and Nice Work programmes, and on BBC Radio 5 Live on several occasions.

Helping people embrace differences

Diversity fascinates me. As a concept it is pretty simple and straightforward. Embedding it into our organisational culture, however, is a highly complex task. The complexity derives from the resistance to it—sometimes active but more often passive; rarely conscious, most often subconscious.

There's no point in having diversity in an organisation if you can't leverage it. This requires an inclusive working environment—one where difference is welcomed and encouraged. The only problem is that as human beings we like similarity and familiarity, and this is at the root of the resistance—albeit unconscious resistance.

So for me, diversity starts with introspection: helping smart people better understand themselves and why they view the world in the way they do, so that they can then make the conscious decision to seek out people who see the world differently and to look at it through another's lens. This is imperative because what's certain in life is that diversity will continue to increase.