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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 for over 20 years 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 previously called the “Diversity Office”, now the Diversity & Inclusion Programme”.
What keeps her going as the Diversity & Inclusion Programme Leader is something she describes as a bottomless pit of creative ideas. "In Legal, you work within rigid frameworks. Here, the management gives me trust and freedom to experiment, to get it wrong sometimes and to try again."
The slogan that launched a program
CERN’s 25 by ‘25 initiative had a simple premise: reach 25% of women across CERN's employed population by the end of 2025. Initially, it was just the slogan that sprung to Louise’s mind one winter morning. She built the ambitious initiative around it.
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 more likely to advance on both.
Clusters, pipelines, and the Comfort of Familiarity
The nationality piece looked at where concentrations of a single nationality exceeded 25% within a department or departmental group. Not as a penalty, but as a diagnostic. Much of what it revealed came down to the “affinity bias” effect: candidates who previously worked at CERN, or who might share the same education institute or dominant language of the group, may have been preferred, albeit unconsciously. Familiarity yields comfort and the pattern regenerates.
To address this challenge within 25 by ’25, CERN built recruitment dashboards to track gender and nationality diversity at five stages, from long list to final offer. The data helps to indicate at which stage the diversity may be seeping out and, in some cases, gave department heads the leverage to send back an insufficiently diverse shortlist with the instruction to try again.
Decentralizing Ownership
Rather than running everything centrally, 25 by ‘25 relied on a new network of departmental Diversity and Inclusion Officers (DIO), appointed by their respective department head and allocated up to 10% of their working time on implementing 25by’25. Departments were invited to choose 12 actions out of the more than 40 in the “ 25 by ’25 action menu” across six themes. These actions were intended to help the departments attract and retain a greater diversity of gender and nationality, while always priortising excellence. The introduction of the DIO network was the one action every department chose and implemented.
"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 across the employed personnel. Louise's response: We blew up 24.7 balloons and held a party. The 24.7th balloon was written out by hand.
Given CERN's low staff turnover, moving from 21% in 2021 to 24.7% in 2025 was no small feat. More encouraging still: at peak, over 31% of new arrivals were women, and in STEM roles (science, technology, engineering, math), new arrivals hit 25.2%, meaning the initiative actually reached its target where it matters most. In the theoretical physics department, 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: systems are not designed to exclude, but they don't easily include either. CERN's parallel “Conscious Hiring” initiative to improve the personnel return for underrepresented Member States asked hiring managers to scrutinise 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: avoid applying to every possible vacancy. 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 successor initiative, Inclusion Matters, builds on 25 by ’25 and aims for 50 inclusion-related actions over the current five years’ mandate. Proposals come from any member of personnel, evaluated by a new D&I strategic oversight board. Actions can be large or small, process-driven or structural, and can benefit one person or an entire community. "A single inclusion action that greatly benefits one person is as impactful as a single campaign that benefits an entire community."
Louise expects to land at around 48.7 by the end of 2030. Which, for what it's worth, sounds like a very good result.