(she/her)
For the Diversity Trust, Stella Sutcliffe is a Consultant in:
- Gender Equality & Inclusion
- Supporting Women in the Workplace
- Closing Gender Pay Gaps
- Unconscious and Implicit Bias
Stella is a specialist in gender and inclusion, particularly with reference to the workplace. She has developed her expertise through holding a range of key positions, including: Employer Relationships Consultant at Mumsnet, Director of Partnerships at Timewise and Employer Relationship Manager at Working Families.
She’s the Founder of GoTitleFree™ and has made it her mission to achieve freedom of gender identity and marital status titles for all areas of society. GoTitleFree™ exists to challenge and facilitate all organisations to stop requesting, and using, name prefixes (i.e. ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’, ‘Ms’, or ‘Mx’) when onboarding and communicating with the public, their customers and their employees.
Stella has multi-sector experience, having worked across education, charity, town planning and urban regeneration, engineering, banking and finance, local government and central government departments.
She’s undertaken research on the subject of marital status titles, interviewing 2000 individuals. She reports the following findings:
- 94% of non-binary individuals interviewed said that the request for marital status titles made them feel frustrated ‘every time’.
- 71% of divorced women said they did not know what title to select when separated from their husbands, and that they wished they could bypass the question.
- 71% of individuals said they would be put off buying a product or service if they were addressed incorrectly.
Stella is active in several networks with a focus on gender and inclusion: Institute for Equality and Diversity Practitioners, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion in STEMM and Diversity & Inclusion Leadership. In terms of core expertise, she specialises in: Gender Equality; Gender Inclusive Language; Unconscious Bias/Implicit Bias; Direct and Indirect Discrimination; Women Returner Programmes/Women’s Networks; Flexible working best practice; Family Friendly Policy best practice.