It wasn’t a panel about women in business. It was a conversation about how business itself changes when women are truly in power.
At SXSW London, Claire Williams (ex-Team Principal, Williams F1), Liz Jeffery (VP, People Experience, Sony Music), and Henrietta Rix (Co-founder, RIXO) joined moderator Elle Davidson to reimagine the workplace through a female-centric lens one that rejects legacy structures in favor of flexibility, support, and performance grounded in equity.
What united them wasn’t industry it was impact.
Claire Williams: Driving Change in a Male-Dominated Machine
Claire Williams knows what it means to be the only woman in the room. When she took over as Team Principal at Williams F1 in 2013, just 9% of the workforce was female. Media interviews often began with, “What’s it like being a woman running an F1 team?”
Her response: change the team, not just the optics.
She launched structural reforms from maternity policies to a “Women at Williams” network and focused on visibility at every level. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” she reminded the audience, urging leaders to “live and breathe” the equity they want to see. By the time she left, women made up 19% of the team and the pipeline was stronger than ever.
Her strategy wasn’t about tokenism. It was about systemic, everyday leadership remaking the environment to allow top talent to actually perform.
Liz Jeffery: Redesigning Policy with Empathy and Business Sense
At Sony Music UK, Liz Jeffery helped introduce the company’s first-of-its-kind childcare policy making it easier for working parents to stay and grow within the organization. That initiative now sits alongside equal parental leave and neonatal care support.
But for Jeffery, policy is just the start. “It’s not enough to have the words on a page. You have to create a culture where people feel empowered to use them.”
She made the business case for care: better retention, improved employer brand, and a workplace where loyalty isn’t asked for it’s earned. Sony Music now boasts its strongest retention metrics in years. “Bold change takes investment,” she said. “But unless we act, nothing shifts.”
Henrietta Rix: Building Equity from the Ground Up
Unlike Williams and Jeffery, Rix started with a blank slate. She co-founded RIXO from her university living room. Today, the fashion label employs over 100 women and has built a workplace around flexibility, trust, and lived experience.
Rix’s culture ethos is intuitive: let people show up as their full selves. If someone needs to drop their child at nursery, that’s a given not a risk. If a team member struggles, they’re met with support, not silence.
She emphasized how naïveté can be an asset. “We didn’t have to unlearn toxic norms. We just built something better.” Paid internships, long-term supplier relationships, and clear progression pathways are now baked into how RIXO runs.
The Cultural Blueprint: Flexibility, Visibility, and Boldness
Together, the three leaders outlined a culture playbook that works:
Flexibility is not a perk it’s infrastructure. Everyone benefits from a workplace that assumes complexity in people’s lives.
Visibility creates aspiration. Women in senior roles aren’t symbols, they’re signals to future leaders that success is possible.
Policy must meet lived experience. A great initiative means nothing if people are afraid to use it. Empowerment is operational, not performative.
Care is a competitive advantage. When employees feel trusted and supported, retention and performance follow.
Equity requires everyone. As Williams put it: “Talk to the men. Bring them with you. They’re part of the solution.”
What Could the Future Feel Like?
In the final minutes, each panelist painted their vision of a female-centric future:
Claire Williams: A world where no woman feels out of place in leadership because the question of gender doesn’t even come up.
Liz Jeffery: A culture of ease not competition. One where care isn’t exceptional, it’s expected.
Henrietta Rix: A true reset. Where parental roles are shared freely, and high-performance doesn’t demand self-erasure.
What they described wasn’t utopian. It was operational and already in motion. You just have to choose to build it.
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