Members Directory
CEW members are leaders across diverse sectors in Australia, including government, business, sport, academia, the arts, and the not-for-profit sector.
Our members share a unifying goal: to remove systemic barriers and create pipelines that enable Australian women to rise to leadership positions in their communities. This ensures a diversity of women's voices at every decision-making table while supporting both women and men to thrive—at work and home.
Lisa Annese
Lisa Annese has been the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity Council Australia since 2 June 2014. In this role she leads debate on diversity and inclusion in the public arena.
Under her leadership, DCA delivers innovative diversity practice resources for Australian businesses and supports in them improving their inclusion capability. She has led a broad array of ground-breaking, evidence-based research, including Australia’s first national index on workplace diversity and inclusion, seminal research on the economics of the gender pay-gap, and original work on Counting Culture and building Asian Leadership Capability, as well as research supporting individuals being “Out at Work” main-streaming flexible work and myth-busting workplace responses to sexual harassment and, domestic and family violence.
In 2018, Lisa was named one of the AFR’s 100 Women of Influence. In 2019 she was elected to the Board of Amnesty International Australia and in 2021 to the Board on the non-partisan organisation, Women for Election. Lisa is a member Chief Executive Women is Executive Producer of DCA’s podcast, The Art of Inclusion.
Lisa has had a long career in the diversity and inclusion space across the corporate, government and not-for-profit sector.
Some of her career highlights include:
- Developing and launching the #IStandForRespect campaign where over 220 Australian CEO’s have signed up to take a stand against gendered harassment and violence.
- Advocating for policy action in areas including: making workplaces safer via changes to the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) and Fair Work Act (2009), on government funded paid parental leave and accessible, affordable child-care, closing the gender pay gap, achieving Australian Marriage Equality, maintaining protections in the Race Discrimination Act (Cth 1995) and a strengthening of the Workplace Gender Equality Act (2013) and more recently advocating for greater representation of women and girls in STEM careers, reducing the incidence of sexual harassment and violence against women and for greater multi-faith inclusion without regressive religious freedom laws.
- Presenting DCA research at international forums, including recently at the Commission for the Status of Women (virtually) in New York, a UNESCO Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the University of Patras, Greece and the University of Texas, US. She has also represented DCA at the United Nations Alliance of Civilisations in both Doha (Qatar) and Kerala (India).
- At the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (formerly EOWA), developing the first ever census of ‘Australian Women in Leadership’, the first ever ‘Business Achievement Awards’, the creation of the ‘Employer of Choice for Women’ citation and the development and implementation of the policy framework for the EOWA Act (1999) with Australian businesses. For her contribution at EOWA, she was awarded a Medal for Significant Contribution to the Australian Public Service.
- Co-authoring “Chief Executives Unplugged: CEO’s Get Real About Women in the Workplace”.
- FILTER:
- Chief Executive Women
- NSW