Ruth Hunt

Why organisations work with Baroness Ruth Hunt

• She ran the organisation that most large UK employers used as their inclusion benchmark, which means her advice to a C-suite team carries direct operational memory, not theory.
• She has spent the years since Stonewall inside the House of Lords as a Crossbench peer, watching how legislation, regulation and public mood shape the room a CEO walks into.
• Her consultancy Deeds and Words is built around collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods, giving executive teams a way to make inclusion an operating discipline rather than a statement.
• She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins, which gives her a public intellectual register useful when boards want a serious conversation, not a training module.
• She is comfortable on contested ground. Boards facing trans policy, religious freedom or campaign-group pressure get an adviser who has lived inside the argument from the inside of a national institution.

Biography highlights

• Chief Executive, Stonewall, 2014 to 2019; led campaigns including Rainbow Laces with the Premier League and the No Bystanders schools programme.
• Crossbench peer, House of Lords, since October 2019, as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green.
• Co-founder and Director, Deeds and Words, advising C-suite teams on collective and inclusive leadership.
• Visiting Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, elected 2023.
• Editor, The Book of Queer Prophets: 24 Writers on Sexuality and Religion, William Collins, 2020.
• Named No. 1 on the Independent Pride Power List, 2019; speaker platforms include the Oxford Union, the NHS and Talks At Google.

Biography

Stonewall under Ruth Hunt’s leadership became the standard against which large UK employers measured their own inclusion work. The Workplace Equality Index and Diversity Champions programme moved inclusion from charity advocacy into employer practice, which is why her audience for serious leadership conversations is now the C-suite, not the diversity function.

Since leaving Stonewall in 2019 she has taken a Crossbench seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, the youngest Crossbench peer at the time of her appointment. The Lords work gives her a continuous read on how legislation and public mood reshape the operating environment for organisations, particularly on the contested edges of equality policy.

Through Deeds and Words, the consultancy she co-founded with Caroline Ellis, she works with senior teams on collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods. The argument is that inclusive leadership is a way of running an organisation, not an HR position, and that the leaders who treat it as the latter tend to lose ground when the politics gets harder.

Her published work runs alongside the advisory practice. She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins in 2020, a collection of 24 essays on sexuality and religion that signalled an interest in difficult ground rather than safe ground. In 2023 she was elected a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where she has spoken on faith, identity and public leadership.

Key speaking topics

• Inclusive leadership in a contested political environment
• Collective leadership and humble inquiry as executive practice
• Building credible culture change in large organisations
• LGBTQ+ rights, politics and the new culture wars
• Allyship as a workplace discipline
• Faith, identity and public life

Ideal for

• CEOs and executive committees who need to take a credible position on inclusion under public and political pressure
• Chief People Officers and Chief Diversity Officers moving from advocacy framing to operating discipline
• Board directors handling reputational risk on equality, faith or values-based policy
• Public sector and uniformed service leaders managing inclusion in hierarchical, mission-led organisations

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on why the inclusion consensus of the 2010s has fractured and what that means for leadership decisions
• A working definition of collective and inclusive leadership that a senior team can actually use the following week
• A clearer view of where allyship adds operating value and where it becomes performance
• A more confident position on how to hold contested ground without retreating into corporate neutrality