Women who lead
Edwina Dunn OBE changed the way we shop when she pioneered the Tesco Clubcard and now she believes that women hold the key to solving some of the world’s greatest challenges
Edwina Dunn knows what makes people tick. Thirty years ago, she and her husband, Clive, set up their fledgling data analysis company, which lead to an extraordinary revolution when Tesco approached them with the idea of a reward card – the first of its kind.
The retail giant needed help processing vast amounts of store data and, over the next 15 years, Edwina and Clive played a pivotal role in establishing the Clubcard, which transformed the Tesco brand and changed the way we bought our groceries.
That was the first half of Edwina’s career. The second has been setting up non-profit movement The Female Lead to break entrenched gender roles in society, especially in the world of work.
It’s no ordinary movement for change. With a stellar cast of supporters, from Oprah Winfrey to Olivia Colman, The Female Lead has collected hundreds of stories from leading women in their field to show the possibilities open to women today.
The stories are featured on The Female Lead’s website, its YouTube channel and in Edwina’s first two books, The Female Lead: Women Who Shape Our World and We Rise By Lifting Others, which aimed ‘to show girls there was a whole world of role models out there, not just the ones that algorithms would deliver them on social media’.
Her latest book, When She’s In The Room: How Empowering Women Empowers The World, which is out now, combines those stories with new data and research from thousands of women. It’s packed with strategies and advice on everything from asking for a pay rise to avoiding burnout.
THE POWER OF TWO
So, what brought a young girl from Surrey, who confesses she was ‘bored’ at school, to a place of such insight and ambition for the future of womankind?
It starts, perhaps, with her role within her family. A middle child, she saw her elder brother, also called Clive, as her parents’ ‘sun king’, while her younger sister, Philippa, was ‘funny and cute’.
‘I was in the middle,’ she explains, ‘and I don’t think I ever felt left out, but I had to find my own sense of identity because it wasn’t immediately granted to me.’
That was helpful, she says. ‘I think if you learn to work hard for something at the beginning, you never have that sense of entitlement, which can be a gift but also a terrible curse.’
At her girls’ school, she says she was ‘terribly lazy’, but that all changed when she began working. After completing a geography degree, she joined the London branch of an American software company as a ‘girl Friday’. The firm was revolutionary in its approach to data, and Edwina – young, outgoing and personable –
