IWD Voices: Jessica Miles – ‘The Next Generation Is Watching What We Build Now’

Though International Women’s Day is behind us, we are continuing to spotlight voices from across the industry as part of our IWD Voices series, with leaders sharing their journeys, experiences, insights, and the lessons that have shaped them.

Next up, we speak with Jessica Miles, Country Manager, ANZ at IAS.

Jessica reflects on what the IWD 2026 theme means to her personally, drawing on her own experience of how access and sponsorship shaped her trajectory, and addresses where she believes the most meaningful work on equity still needs to happen.

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She also discusses the leadership decisions she made as Country Manager during COVID — from preserving flexibility to extending coaching access to her team — and the lesson from early in her career that permanently changed how she thinks about what it means to empower people.

The theme for International Women’s Day 2026 is “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.” What does this mean to you professionally and personally?

“For ALL” keeps coming back to me because it is both a promise and a challenge.

I grew up in government housing, raised by a single parent. I did not have a conventional starting point. What I had was access to opportunity and people willing to extend it when it mattered. That experience shapes everything I believe about this theme.

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For me, equal opportunity is the goal worth fighting for. The belief that regardless of where you start, the door can open. That your effort, your ambition, and your choices have real power to shape your outcome. That is not a naive idea, it is the thing I have lived.

What I have watched, and what stays with me, is talented women not getting that door opened. Not because they lacked capability or drive, but because access was never extended. Sponsorship. Visibility. Someone willing to make the introduction that changes a trajectory. That is the work. And when we get it right, it is genuinely transformative.

What first drew you to your industry, and was there a defining moment that set your career in motion? Was there a role model who influenced you early on?

I did not arrive at this career in a straight line.

Early on, I was made redundant. At the time, it felt like a setback (I cried!). In retrospect, it was the turning point. It pushed me into a role and an industry I would not have otherwise pursued, and it was there that my manager, a man who saw something in me I had not yet named in myself, made an introduction that changed everything.

What she gave me was rare. Permission to back myself and think beyond the role I was in. An honest mirror, the kind of feedback that only comes from someone with no agenda except your growth

He connected me with a woman working in a completely different industry. She became my mentor, and now she is my business coach. That relationship has been one of the most significant of my career.

What she gave me was rare. Permission to back myself and think beyond the role I was in. An honest mirror, the kind of feedback that only comes from someone with no agenda except your growth. And a reframe of ambition that made it feel like mine, not something imposed on me or expected of me.

That last part mattered more than I can properly articulate. She helped me locate my own version of ambition, rather than performing someone else’s. And the manager who made that introduction? He deserves equal credit. He did not have to see that in me. He chose to.

How has your understanding of fairness changed as you’ve gained experience and seniority?

I believe deeply in equal opportunity, and I believe equally in personal accountability. To me, those ideas are not in tension. They are the same idea.

I came from a background where nobody was smoothing the path for me. What shifted my trajectory was access, a manager who made an introduction, a mentor who told me the truth, and an opportunity extended rather than withheld. Once I had that, the rest was mine to do. And that felt right.

What has changed as I have grown is my appreciation for how much genuine barriers cost people, not just the individuals who hit them, but organisations that lose talent unnecessarily. Removing those barriers is not charity. It is good leadership and good commercial sense.

What shifted my trajectory was access, a manager who made an introduction, a mentor who told me the truth, and an opportunity extended rather than withheld. Once I had that, the rest was mine to do. And that felt right.

Fairness, to me, is the presence of genuine opportunity. Not the absence of difficulty, but the knowledge that the door is open and the path is yours to walk.

As conversations around women and work have evolved, what do you think has genuinely improved and where do you think more attention and action are still needed?

Progress is real and worth naming. The conversation around representation, mentorship and leadership pathways for women has matured significantly. More doors are open than when I started, and that matters.

Where I think the energy is best spent now is on the unglamorous, high-impact work that does not make press releases. Senior people actively sponsoring talent, particularly from non-traditional backgrounds. Leaders who make introductions, extend visibility, and back people before those people have fully backed themselves. That is where trajectories actually change.

Where I think the energy is best spent now is on the unglamorous, high-impact work that does not make press releases. Senior people actively sponsoring talent, particularly from non-traditional backgrounds

I know this from experience. I grew up without a structural advantage. What changed my path was not a system designed around my circumstances; it was people who chose to open a door. A manager who saw potential and acted on it. A mentor who invested her time in me. Those individual acts of sponsorship compounded into a career.

That is what I want more of. A broader culture of leaders who actively look for people who need a door opened and open it. When you extend genuine opportunity and pair it with genuine accountability, remarkable things happen. I am evidence of that.

Is there a project or initiative you’ve worked on related to women’s empowerment that you’re particularly proud of? What made it meaningful to you?

I became Country Manager at IAS during COVID. Which meant I cut my teeth leading through the period when every assumption about where and how work happens was being stress-tested in real time.

What I observed during that period changed my thinking permanently.

The people on my team were doing extraordinary work. At home, at odd hours, across time zones, while managing caring responsibilities and genuine uncertainty. The flexibility was not making them less productive. It was making them more human. And that made them better at the job.

The most important thing a leader can do beyond any policy, any framework, any public commitment is to invest real time in people.

As we transitioned back, I was not interested in returning to the way things were. I had seen what was possible when people had genuine autonomy. I advocated hard for preserving that, not as a policy concession, but as a commercial decision. Trusted people build better relationships. That is not soft thinking. That is revenue logic.

I also pushed for external coaching access for my team, because I had seen firsthand what the right person in your corner could do. Not everyone has a mentor who lands in their life at the right moment. Coaching creates a more deliberate version of that.

What responsibility do senior leaders have in shaping more equitable workplaces, beyond statements or policies?

Culture is shaped by behaviour, not declarations. Every senior leader knows this. Fewer act on it consistently.

The most important thing a leader can do beyond any policy, any framework, any public commitment is to invest real time in people. Not performative mentorship. Not a quarterly check-in. Genuine, sustained sponsorship of the people around you. Advocating for them in rooms they are not yet in. Backing them before they have fully backed themselves.

That investment is not altruistic. It is how you build teams that actually perform.

When I became Country Manager, one of the things I felt most strongly about was extending to my team what had been extended to me: access to external coaching. A good coach changes how you think about your own capability. It gives you a mirror, a challenger, and a sounding board that sits outside the immediate pressures of the job. I had experienced that firsthand, and I wanted my team to have it too.

That is what leadership responsibility looks like to me in practice. Not a statement. Not a policy launch. A decision to invest real resources, time, budget, and attention in the people you are accountable for developing.

When you do that consistently and visibly, the culture follows. Not because you declared it. Because you built it.

What is one change you would like to see in workplaces for the next generation of women?

I have two young boys still in daycare. When I think about the workplaces they will eventually enter, I want the answer to feel obvious. Of course, you can be ambitious and present. Of course, flexibility and structure can coexist. Of course, your identity outside work is an asset, not a liability.

That should not feel aspirational. It should be the baseline.

The next generation will not accept the trade-offs many of us navigated quietly. They should not have to. The organisations that will attract and keep the best people are those that have been designed around human realities from the start, not retrofitted flexibility into systems built for a different era.

Technology, and AI specifically, gives us the tools to make that shift. The question is whether leadership has the will to use them deliberately.

Design it intentionally. The next generation is watching what we build now.

Quick Hits

A trend you are excited about, or not excited about

The wellness and longevity movement, specifically the science finally catching up on women’s health.

For too long, the majority of health and performance research was conducted on men and applied to women as an afterthought. Women were treated as smaller versions of men rather than physiologically distinct human beings with their own hormonal landscape, metabolic patterns, and health risks. The data gap is significant, and its consequences have been real. Misdiagnosed conditions, generalised advice that does not work for female bodies, and a chronic underestimation of how much women’s health changes across a lifetime.

That is starting to shift. Researchers and clinicians are now building bodies of work specifically focused on how women respond differently to exercise, nutrition, stress, and sleep across different life stages. How perimenopause and menopause are not just reproductive events but full-system transitions that affect cardiovascular health, bone density, cognitive function, and mental health. How the hormonal fluctuations across a month, let alone a lifetime, mean that a one-size-fits-all approach to health has never served women well.

What excites me is not just the science; it is the cultural permission that comes with it. Women are increasingly advocating more loudly for answers that actually fit their biology. To push back on advice that was never designed for them. To take their symptoms seriously rather than being told they are normal.

Understanding your own physiology is not a luxury. It is how you perform, sustain yourself, and show up fully at work, at home, across a long career and a long life.

A creative campaign or representation of women that inspired you or made you feel seen

P&G’s “Thank You, Mom” Olympic campaign. If you have not watched it, stop and find it now.

It follows the journey of Olympic athletes from childhood to the podium, but the lens is entirely on their mothers. The unglamorous, relentless, behind-the-scenes work of raising someone who goes on to do extraordinary things. No dialogue. Just the quiet, powerful reality of what it takes.

It does something most brands never manage: it makes the invisible visible. The woman who is not on the podium, not in the headline, not getting the medal, but without whom none of it happens.

As a working mother, I found it genuinely moving. Not because it is sentimental, but because it is honest. The investment mothers make is enormous, and this campaign celebrated it without shrinking it or softening it.

It also reframed what a role model looks like. Sometimes the most influential person in the room is the one nobody sees.

A piece of advice that stayed with you longer than expected

It was not advice exactly. It was a moment that quietly rewired how I think about leadership.

Very early in my career, I participated in a startup weekend. I was leading a team of people from completely different backgrounds and generations. We worked around the clock, the energy was high, and I was running on instinct.

My instinct was this: people do the best work when they choose what they work on. So when a team member with a military background came to me and asked what I wanted him to do, I turned the question back to him. What do you want to do? He looked at me, huffed, and walked off. I was genuinely confused.

A more experienced team member pulled me aside. “He comes from the military. Being given a clear task is not a constraint to him; it is how he knows you trust him and value his contribution.”

That has never left me. I had assumed that my version of feeling empowered: autonomy, self-direction, choosing your own path, was universal. It is not. People feel valued in fundamentally different ways, and the job of a leader is to understand which is which, not to project your own preferences onto everyone around you.

It is the reason I invest so much in getting to know the individuals on my team. Not as a management exercise. Because the best thing you can do for someone is meet them where they actually are.