Do you feel a lot of young designers and those starting out in fashion are set up to fail because they don’t have the business training or knowledge they need to succeed?

I think this certainly used to be the case and my first business is an example of how ill-equipped design graduates used to be upon leaving university. I graduated from what I believed to be the best college for success as a designer, consciously choosing the design and marketing course instead of the more famous womenswear course as it sounded more commercial and realising that I had no idea how to think about my designs in the context of business.

How would I cost my clothes, how would I do payroll, what legal structure should my business take and should I favour online over wholesale? There was nothing in my three-year course that ever addressed any of these strategic and legal questions of setting up and running a business. Essentially, we were being trained to play the part of the cog in a huge machine rather than being able to take any ownership of our output.

Today, the whole world has start-up and entrepreneur fever and future creatives are plugged into a world of educational content that is accessible to all, from Ted Talks to HBS case studies. It’s permeating courses that teach creative subjects too, which is wonderful and the latest generations of designers are far more commercially savvy than mine ever was, with many already having considered exit strategies when they first set up!

Both tech and fashion are notorious for being industries led by men. Have you encountered much sexism or are you frustrated by the predominance of men in these fields?

I found the same in the beauty industry actually, when I was at Glossybox. The people on the ground doing the work were mainly women while the people at the top where almost exclusively men – from a handful of schools and universities with very similar backgrounds, both ethnically and socio-economically.

However, it wouldn't be accurate to say that I have encountered a lot of sexism. There have been less than a handful of cases over the past decade when I’ve been treated at a disadvantage due to being a woman. What I definitely have noticed and continue to notice every day, is systemic conscious and unconscious bias against women. Whether it’s women themselves feeling that they are somehow not good enough or deserving of equal rights (examples I have come across recently are a woman who felt the need to let potential employers know that she’s expecting a child because she feel it’s “unfair” to put the employer at a disadvantage with maternity leave and cover and a woman suggesting a male expert instead of accepting an invitation to do a keynote on a topic at a big conference) or expectations from both men and women that women should behave differently than men when managing teams, voicing feedback or in terms of their presentation of self.

The proof really is in the pudding: take the U.S. as an example and women make up almost 60% of undergraduates, 40% of MBA graduates and 40% of managers. And yet, when it comes to the C-Suite and Board Level, women make up only 4.6% of CEOs at S&P 500 companies. How do we go from a more or less equal distribution to less than 5% at the top if they are as just as well qualified as the men?

There’s a huge amount to be done to mean women do not drop out of the labour force when they start families, in order to start families or because they just aren’t getting ahead or paid equally. And this has to be addressed both by the private sector and in those companies themselves (what can they do to keep women, to address their needs, to recognise their achievements etc) and the public sector in terms of childcare etc as well by the women themselves. Women like Arianna Huffington, Natalie Massenent, Sophia Amoruso, Marissa Mayer and Ursula Burns are all providing role models of what female leadership can look and sound like.

There’s also a lot of hope when you look at the quotas being set, the organisations fighting for equal board representation and also in the numbers: we know that firms with women in the C-Suite are more profitable and that the only 20 odd female CEOs in S&P's 500 earned on average $18.8m in 2015 vs $12.7m of the 455 male CEOs and to me, this provides a lot of motivation to create awareness for these issues, help to educate about barriers like unconscious bias, and inspire girls to recognise that they live at the most exciting time to be a woman in the history of mankind and to make the most of it.