Paula Stone Williams
Workplace gender parity stalls in the same place inside most large organisations. The data shows the gap, training cycles run, and senior women still report that authority is extended to them differently than to male peers in the same role. Inclusion programmes struggle to move past awareness into anything that changes how a meeting actually runs.
Paula Stone Williams is a pastoral counselor and author whose work helps organisations move workplace gender equity and LGBTQ+ inclusion from policy statement into the substance of how meetings, decisions and authority actually operate.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Paula Stone Williams
- A first-person comparative account of professional life as a senior man and a senior woman, drawing on lived experience that almost no other speaker can offer at the executive level.
- A memoir published by Simon & Schuster (As a Woman, 2021), four TED talks with combined viewership over nine million, and sustained coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and CNN.
- Substantive content on the mechanics of allyship for male leaders, framed as a practical capability rather than a values statement.
- A speaker who can address gender equity and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the same keynote without flattening either, useful to organisations where these conversations are usually held in separate rooms.
Biography highlights
- Author of As a Woman: What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned (Simon & Schuster, 2021), optioned by Cannonball Productions for a limited series.
- Co-author of She’s My Dad with her son Jonathan Williams.
- TED, TEDWomen, TEDSummit and TEDxMileHigh speaker; four talks with combined viewership over nine million.
- Featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, ABC Primetime News, Good Morning America, People Magazine and Red Table Talk.
- Pastor of preaching and worship at Left Hand Church, Longmont, Colorado.
- Pastoral counselor with RLT Pathways; doctorate in counseling.
Biography
Most workplace gender equity programmes are designed by people who have only ever held authority inside one set of expectations. Paula Stone Williams has held senior roles as both a man and a woman, and her keynote work is built on the comparative material that produced. The argument is empirical rather than rhetorical: the same person, the same competence, two markedly different professional experiences.
Her memoir As a Woman: What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned was published by Simon & Schuster in 2021 and has been optioned by Cannonball Productions. Her TED, TEDWomen, TEDSummit and TEDxMileHigh talks have together passed nine million views. The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Good Morning America and People Magazine have covered her work.
Alongside the keynote practice she is a pastoral counselor with RLT Pathways and pastor of preaching and worship at Left Hand Church in Longmont, Colorado. The counseling background shapes how she handles the room, which matters in this subject area; audiences leave with material they can act on rather than only feelings they have processed.
The most useful thing she gives a corporate audience is a precise account of how allyship behaves in practice. Male leaders who want to support women and LGBTQ+ colleagues are often unsure what the substantive ask actually is. Williams names it directly, with examples, and treats it as a capability that can be learned.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace gender equity
- LGBTQ+ inclusion in corporate environments
- Allyship as a practical capability for senior leaders
- Authority, voice and credibility across gender
- Storytelling and narrative communication
- Resilience through identity and career change
- Bridging cultural and religious divides
Ideal for
- CHROs and DEI leads designing substantive inclusion work after initial awareness programmes.
- Senior leadership offsites where male executives are the intended audience for an allyship conversation.
- Women’s leadership networks and ERGs commissioning an external voice on workplace parity.
- Universities, professional services firms and faith-adjacent institutions navigating LGBTQ+ inclusion under public scrutiny.
Audience outcomes
- A first-person frame of reference for how authority is extended differently to men and women in the same senior role.
- A concrete vocabulary for what allyship looks like inside a meeting, a hiring decision and a promotion conversation.
- A view of LGBTQ+ inclusion grounded in lived experience rather than abstract policy language.
- Material that male leaders, in particular, can repeat back to their teams without feeling they are reciting a script.
Talks
A first-person account of how professional authority, voice and credibility were extended to her differently in each role, supported by data on workplace parity.
Key takeaways:
- A comparative frame for understanding why gender parity stalls past the awareness stage.
- The specific moments at which authority is granted or withheld inside a meeting.
- Why competence is read differently depending on who is in the room.
A follow-up keynote focused on the obstacles and opportunities to genuine workplace parity, aimed at audiences ready to move past introductory material.
Key takeaways:
- Where standard parity programmes typically stall and why.
- What senior men can do that materially changes outcomes for women in their organisation.
- How to read parity data without flattening the underlying behavioural patterns.
A talk on supporting LGBTQ+ colleagues that reframes allyship as an apprenticeship rather than a fixed identity.
Key takeaways:
- Why “ally” as a self-description has weakened as a useful term.
- What an apprentice posture looks like in practice.
- The behaviours that distinguish genuine support from performative support.
A keynote on listening across difference as the foundational capability for inclusion work.
Key takeaways:
- Why most organisational listening is a turn-taking exercise rather than listening.
- The specific habits that signal genuine attention.
- How leaders can model listening as a visible capability.