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A lawyer who stumbled into D&I
Louise's background is not what you might expect. Born in Liverpool, raised in Canada, of Anglo-Irish Goan descent, she trained and worked as a barrister before landing at CERN. The shift into diversity and inclusion came almost by surprise, when senior management approached her with a role she hadn't been looking for. They cited her integrity, her advocacy experience, and her grasp of CERN's legal framework. She accepted. Then she added the I to what had been called simply the diversity office.
What keeps her going is something she describes as a bottomless pit of creative ideas. "In Legal, you work within rigid frameworks. Here, the management gives me carte blanche to experiment, to get it wrong sometimes and to fix it."
The slogan that launched a program
The 25 by 25 initiative had a simple premise: reach 25% of women across CERN's employed population by the end of 2025. The slogan came to Louise one morning before the program existed. She built it around that.
The language was carefully negotiated. "Aspirational target" was the compromise; a quota was never on the table. But a target does something important: it creates a focus around which people behave differently, especially in a scientific organisation where anything measurable gains traction. Louise also attached a nationality dimension to the initiative, reasoning that pairing two dimensions made it harder to dismiss either one.
Clusters, pipelines, and the Comfort of Familiarity
The nationality piece looked at where concentrations of a single nationality exceeded 25% within a department group. Not as a penalty, but as a diagnostic. Much of what it revealed came down to the pipeline effect: familiar candidates get hired, they become the template, and the pattern regenerates.
To counter this, CERN built recruitment dashboards tracking gender and nationality diversity at five stages, from long list to final offer. The data made the bias visible, and gave courageous department heads the evidence to send a shortlist back and say: not good enough, try again.
Decentralizing Ownership
Rather than running everything centrally, 25 by 25 relied on a network of Departmental Diversity and Inclusion Officers, each spending up to 10% of their time on the topic. Together with consulting firm Thriving Talent, the team developed over 40 specialised actions across six themes. Each department chose 12. The DIO model was the one action every department chose.
"If you really want to affect culture change, you need the people locally to own it. It's much more impactful than feeling like it's an imposed policy from the top."
24.7 Balloons
By the end of 2025, CERN landed at 24.7% women. Louise's response: They blew up 24.7 balloons and held a party. The 24.7th balloon was written out by hand.
Given CERN's very low turnover, moving from 21% to 24.7% was no small feat. More encouraging still: at peak, over 31% of new arrivals were women, and in STEM specifically, new arrivals hit 25.2%, meaning the initiative actually reached its target where it matters most. In theoretical physics, colleagues reported women taking up more space in conversations, speaking where they might previously have stayed quiet. Culture shift, quietly underway.
Lessons for the International Sector
For professionals in the UN system, development banks, or NGOs, the lesson is direct: most systems are not designed to exclude, but they don't easily include either. CERN's parallel Conscious Hiring initiative asked hiring managers to interrogate their own vacancy notices. Is that language requirement genuinely necessary, or is it quietly narrowing the field? Who is already in the team? Are you about to hire someone who just feels familiar?
For candidates, Louise's advice is equally plain: stop applying to everything. Be specific, do the research, tailor your language. Hiring managers know instantly whether an application is thoughtful or generic.
What comes next: Inclusion Matters
The next initiative, Inclusion Matters, aims for 50 inclusion-related actions over five years. Proposals come from the full membership of personnel, evaluated by a new strategic oversight board. Actions can be large or small, process-driven or structural, and can benefit one person or an entire community. "An inclusion action that benefits one person is as impactful as one that benefits an entire community."
Louise expects to land around 48.7. Which, for what it's worth, sounds like a very good result.