Emily is an award-winning woman of multi racial heritage with over twenty years of experience working in and for a range of organisations across sectors, industries and countries.
She began as an advertising executive and has worked in some of the largest agencies and clients in the world. Later, she took the plunge to launch her own consultancy business, The Third Culture—a company focussed on delivering inclusion solutions for organisations willing to commit to the hard work that it takes to create real and lasting change.
Her inspiration for moving to the world of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) stemmed from a series of events and experiences. As a senior advertising executive working internationally, cross-cultural understanding was an integral part of her working environment and processes. As she became more senior, she also saw the benefits of running high-performing teams with a ‘culture-first’ approach – she could see how this not only created happy teams but thriving and high-performing teams. She also became an ally for the LGBTQ+ community, launching networks in Hong Kong that were specifically focused on influencing policy changes. And towards her later years in the media industry while working in Hong Kong she also took responsibility for mentoring and helping implement EDI strategies across all offices in Asia for Wavemaker (part of WPP), and in 2021 she retrained with Cornell University.
Emily has won several awards, such as Top 25 Young People To Look Out for (Philippine National Enquirer 2005), Campaign Asia’s Woman to Watch (2018), and Winner of Respect Individuality (groupM 2019) among various media awards. And more recently, in 2024, The Third Culture was shortlisted for DEI Innovation at the UnderOne Awards.
Her knowledge and experience in understanding how to work in global environments with multi-layered cultural challenges have been critical to delivering great business results and social impact. Her interest, passion and commitment to diversity and inclusion and dedication to active allyship across the diversity spectrum, stems from her multi-ethnic family and her background as a ‘third culture kid’ growing up in Asia and Europe, as well as her unique cultural business experiences. She is multi-racial and presents as white, so she has a keen sense of intersectionality that lived experience to challenge perceptions and help aid understanding.