With a roster of familiar companies on her CV - the Burton Group, BAA, Shell, Barclays and Lloyds Banking - Pavita Cooper could quite simply have enjoyed the perks of early retirement, after years of working in big corporate firms while raising two children with her husband.
Instead, for the past 15 years, she has been campaigning for more women to be CEOs of FTSE 100 companies as well as for better representation of females on those boards.
As chair of the 30% Club in the UK, Cooper works with influential people in the industry and in government to bring about systemic change, so that companies nurture and promote female talent to become CEOs.
“This campaign (launched by Dame Helena Morrissey in 2010) was really about men and women working together,” Cooper told the GG2 Power List in January.
“Its members were men, because, back then, all the chairs were male, so they used their agency to speak out, and they advocated for greater change.
“Then they recruited other chairs to say, ‘you need to come with us, to say we're going to create this change’. They faced a lot of resistance. But they put their neck on the line to say, we want we want to agitate, and we want to create change.
“It wasn't easy, because they were there was a lot of pushback from other men saying, ‘please don't do this. Nothing’s broken, so don't fix it’. But they used a lot of their own personal profile and were brave enough to speak out.”
This February sees a fresh focus on the campaign, with about 20 chairs from the FTSE 100 invited to speak about the issue in February and a further 15-20 in March.
“Where are all the female CEOs?” Cooper wondered aloud, sitting in a café at the Old Vic in south London. She is on the board of trustees at the theatre.
Two years ago, 11 women led the UK’s biggest companies, however, by December 2025 the following year, the figure dropped to seven. It will go up to eight in April, when a new BP CEO is appointed.
Cooper said, “Last year, we had a big exodus of women leading our biggest companies.
“They were all - apart from the new BP CEO - replaced by men.
“In 2011 we only had five. That's a net increase of two women in 15 years.
“You have to say to yourself, in an economy this size, as a G20 country, do we honestly think that's okay?”
It’s a better picture when it comes to female representation on FTSE 100 boards.
Cooper said, “We are world leading, second only to France, who got there using government quotas. We did it on a voluntary basis – business-led, with CEOs and chairs leaning in, wanting this change.”
The agenda for the February “re-engagement”, as Cooper described it, is to focus on possible points of action.
“What are we going to collectively do? This has to be a system-wide response.
“The chairs have the power to think about how they can intervene, to say, how do we get more women ready? How do we talk about this? How do we understand who the candidates are? How do we share knowledge, to be much more interventional and purposeful about how we're going to stem this flow? And I'm calling it 30 by 30.”
Having worked for decades in some of the UK’s top companies in senior positions, Cooper has an insight into company culture and the pace of progress when it comes to leadership roles. She takes a pragmatic view about the 30 by 30 strapline.
“I'm not deluded and thinking we're going to get 30 women running companies in the UK by 2030. It's more a rallying call to say, if we don't talk about this or shine a light on it, we'll just go backwards,” she said. “It's a campaign to draw attention, rather than saying it's a goal.”
While it is proving harder for companies to appoint women as CEOs, there has been a “very seismic shift” in having women on boards in the past decade, Cooper said.
In 2010, the figure was about 12.5 per cent, and in the past decade, it first increased to 30 per cent, and then to almost 45 per cent, across all boards in the UK, including the top 500 private companies.
Cooper, however, digs deep and looks beyond the numbers, at the nuances, the masked details, to see why progress to CEOs is stalling.
“A lot of those women in those top jobs, they're the HR director, the marketing director, they're the company secretary; in many cases, the head of legal, or audit. They might even be the finance director. What they're not is the really big divisional CEOs.
“When you look at who succeeds to the CEO role, it's people in those big jobs.
“Obviously, by default, the women aren't getting the big jobs, which is why we're not seeing as many women become CEOs.”
She also noted some negative media coverage - such as women executives stepping down and who were replaced by a seasoned CEO - “a euphemism for a man”.
“There's multiple factors here; for women, the price of failure is much higher, the scrutiny is much higher. When men fail, no one talks about that,” Cooper said. “It's putting women off wanting to do this.”
The 30% Club runs an international campaign, across six continents and operating 21 chapters – from the US and Ireland to Hong Kong and Australia.
Despite the shunning of diversity and inclusion practices by US president Donald Trump, Cooper said there has been a resetting and rebalancing of approach on that front.
“There has been a natural rebalancing of what has blown up into a very global movement. There's a sensitivity around language and a reset,” she explained.
Cooper said the UK is in a “really, really strong place”, and cited the examples of the Davies Review, the Hampton-Alexander Review and Parker Review – all aimed at increasing female representation in senior positions in FTSE companies.
Mentoring and scholarships are among the action plans pursued by the 30% Club to prepare women leaders of the future. Cooper said there are about 35-40 of the latter on offer in the UK.
Her commitment to the campaign is all the more remarkable given she volunteers her time.
“We're a very small campaign with we're all volunteers. So for the last 14, 15 years now, I volunteered my time.”
In addition to the 30% Club, Cooper has non-executive roles at The Kings Trust and she is also a culture advisor across national security and the State Honours Committee
Through the Speakers for Schools programme, Cooper mentors students.
Her advice for young women entering the work force is to build a support system, whether it's a platonic or emotional relationship.
“If you're going to go all the way to the top, you need this,” she said.
Cooper noticed a lot of young women, particularly early in their career, are so focused on working really hard, they often let go of some of the most important relationships around them, including friendships from university.
“What will happen is 15 years on, that’s the point at which you really need support system, because your life might be different.
“Also, be honest with yourself. If the idea of running a big company isn't for you, that's absolutely fine. There are lots of other ways in which you can have impact in the world.
“But, equally, if you look up anything and you do want that, don't be afraid or ashamed or embarrassed to say it, to state it.
“I am continually shocked at how many times assumptions were made on behalf of mostly women, about what people perceived their level of ambition to be. If you don't say it out loud, if you don't tell people this is where I want to go, if you don't find a sponsor you can go and say, I want this, I need you to help me understand the rules of engagement, how do I navigate the system? What experiences do I need to get? It won't happen.”
Her own role model is mum, who, along with her husband and Pavita’s father, moved from Punjab in India to live in Hounslow in west London in the 1960s.
Cooper’s mum taught masters’ students in Punjab and worked as a head teacher in Southall.
“She continues, has always been in my life, the most iconic role model for me, personally, because of what she achieved and the hardship she went through to get that,” she said.
“The impact she's made on thousands of lives, turning around failing schools in places like Southall, leading her kids that no one believed in… but she didn't come from the world of business, and that's where I wanted to be.”
By her own admission, Cooper had a successful career and rose to senior positions at a relatively young age.
“I was able to work at the top of organisations and really see and understand optimally what was going on, how decisions were being made. Some of them were fair, some clearly weren't,” she said. “And I could observe that for some people, it was going to be harder, and there was a certain type of person getting to the top, and I had this growing sense of injustice that I didn't want the world to be like that.”
Her own experience, growing up as the child of immigrant parents “who were really struggling financially, and seeing how everything was hard”, also motivated Cooper into a campaigning role.
“I watched them do this as good people and with very little themselves, constantly helping others… my mum and dad supporting the community, leaning in, helping people struggling with their immigration status,” she said.
“It was a value they instilled in us to say, it's incumbent on all of us, this life has got to be more than about what we can materially show. It has to be about the difference we've made. I'm now in a position to have a platform and a voice to be able to make a change.”
Cooper recalled how working while raising a family also left an impact on her.
“When I had my children, I was much older. I was at senior level, so my whole identity was defined by my work, and I never saw myself not working,” she said.
“With my first child, I sort of kept going. It was very challenging (to continue working), but I kept going. By the time I had my second one, I was starting to struggle… my husband was a CEO of a bank, and on a Sunday night we were already arguing about who was going to leave first, before the nanny arrived.
“I wanted to go back to work, but I thought, how is this going to work? I wanted to say to them (Cooper’s employers), I've got so much to give. How can I do that in a way that means I have some flexibility, just not working like a maniac the whole time, but also be present in my children's life?
“The long and short of it is that it wasn't possible. I was so incensed by that that I thought, I'm now going to do something to change the fabric of society; it has to be better than this.
“And we need more people of colour who are brilliant represented in these organisations. We need more women and having a child can't stop you. We have to find a way to keep going. And I just felt compelled to do something about it.”
ENDS