Anne-Marie Imafidon

Why organisations work with Anne-Marie Imafidon

• She has run the experiment at scale. Stemettes has engaged more than 60,000 young women and non-binary young people across the UK, Ireland and Europe since 2013, giving her a live evidence base on what moves technical participation and what does not.
• Her technical credibility is not borrowed. Master’s in Mathematics and Computer Science from Oxford at 20, Honorary Fellow of Keble College, and guest arithmetician on Channel 4’s Countdown for 60 episodes, so technical audiences engage her as a peer rather than an advocate.
• She sits inside the UK policy conversation on digital skills. Co-Chair of the Institute for the Future of Work, 2022-2023 President of the British Science Association, and DSIT Women in Tech Envoy, which gives leaders a direct line to how regulation and industrial strategy are likely to land.
• She has a published thesis. She’s In CTRL (Transworld, 2022) argues that women need to take back tech as users, builders and decision-makers; that frame is portable into strategy conversations about product, customer and workforce.
• She is comfortable in front of non-technical boards. Her broadcast work and Chancellorship of Glasgow Caledonian University mean she translates between technical reality and senior decision-maker vocabulary without losing either.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Stemettes, social enterprise founded in 2013 that has reached 60,000+ young women and non-binary young people across the UK, Ireland and Europe.
• Master’s in Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Oxford, aged 20; Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
• Appointed MBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to young women and STEM.
• Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University; 2022-2023 President of the British Science Association; Co-Chair of the Institute for the Future of Work.
• Author of She’s In CTRL: How Women Can Take Back Tech (Transworld, 2022).
• Guest arithmetician on Channel 4’s Countdown across 60 episodes (2021-2022), first Black woman to take the Countdown board; voted Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Woman in UK Tech (2020); Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech.
• DSIT Women in Tech Envoy, co-chairing a UK government Taskforce with the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (2025).

Biography

Stemettes was set up in 2013 after its co-founder returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2012 and decided the UK needed its own infrastructure for girls in STEM. More than 60,000 young women and non-binary young people have passed through its programmes since, across the UK, Ireland and Europe. That operating record is the spine of Anne-Marie Imafidon’s authority on technology talent.

The technical credentials are unusual. Imafidon took her Master’s in Mathematics and Computer Science at Oxford at 20, is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, and was the guest arithmetician on Channel 4’s Countdown for 60 episodes in 2021 and 2022, the first Black woman to run the Countdown board. She was appointed MBE in 2017 for services to young women and STEM.

Her public roles put her inside the UK conversation on digital skills and industrial strategy. She is Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, Co-Chair of the Institute for the Future of Work, served as President of the British Science Association in 2022-2023, and in 2025 was appointed the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Women in Tech Envoy, co-chairing a Taskforce with the Secretary of State.

Her book She’s In CTRL, published by Transworld in 2022, argues that women should treat technology as something to take control of, not just consume or be represented within. For senior leaders it reframes the DEI-in-tech conversation as a product and capability question: who builds the tools, who governs them, and whose problems they get designed to solve.

Key speaking topics

• Women and underrepresented groups in STEM
• Technology talent pipelines and digital skills
• Future of work and AI
• Inclusive product and technology design
• Social entrepreneurship at scale
• UK digital policy and industrial strategy
• Responsible and inclusive AI

Ideal for

• CHROs, CPOs and heads of talent building technology hiring pipelines beyond the usual funnel.
• CTOs, CDIOs and engineering leaders under pressure to improve retention and representation in technical teams.
• Boards and ExCos setting policy on AI, digital skills and workforce strategy, particularly in regulated sectors.
• Corporate foundations, ESG leads and public-sector partners designing STEM and social mobility interventions.

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on why conventional diversity-in-tech programmes under-deliver and where the real intervention points sit.
• A working vocabulary for discussing inclusive AI and technology design at board level without defaulting to platitudes.
• Concrete examples, drawn from Stemettes and UK policy work, of what moves technical participation and retention.
• A reframe of women-in-tech as a product, governance and capability issue, not only a hiring issue.
• A sense of how UK digital skills policy and regulation are likely to shape talent strategy over the next cycle.