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Jo Wimble Groves is an award winning tech entrepreneur, international author and speaker.
She is best known as the co owner of Active Digital, a global award winning mobile tech company she has run with her brother for more than twenty years. Their journey began when they were both teenagers growing a true schoolroom to boardroom success story.
Alongside leading the company, Jo is a highly regarded motivational speaker and an expert on women in leadership. She delivers talks and workshops that encourage more women to step into senior roles and to build the confidence needed to progress in business. She is also a passionate ambassador for STEM subjects and in 2020 won the Everywoman in Tech Entrepreneur of the Year Award for her work.
Jo is an accomplished writer and her views have appeared in The Guardian, Training Journal, Changeboard, InStyle UK and on the BBC. She was recognised in Management Todays 35 under 35 as featured in The Sunday Times and has won multiple Women in Business awards. More recently, she was named in the We Are The City Top 100 Women in Tech and has appeared on Sky News.
In 2016 Jo founded Guilty Mother, a blog created to open up honest conversations about parenting, mum guilt and the realities of work life balance. The award winning blog now reaches more than fifty thousand followers worldwide.
Jo regularly speaks in schools, colleges and universities, sharing her story with young people and highlighting how raising your hand for opportunities can shape your future. She is passionate about helping the next generation understand that you do not have to be an A grade student to become a successful entrepreneur. Her commitment to inspiring young people was recognised in 2019 when she was invited to 10 Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister on International Womens Day.
Engaging, relatable and insightful, Jo Wimble Groves is a powerful voice on leadership, resilience and building a career on your own terms.
Jo speaks about the importance of raising your hand, which is really about taking risks. Living in a society where you constantly feel pressure to be perfect, taking a risk which might result in a failure can be scary. For this reason, girls might not raise their hand in class, unless they are 100% confident of their answer.
This issue then translates into the working world, with female employees being less likely to go for a promotion if they do not meet all of the criteria compared to their male colleagues. One quote from the book I loved is “raising a hand today is about being braver today than you were yesterday”. It is indeed true that it is important to teach young girls to seize opportunities and lead the life they want to, and that that can start with something as small, or big depending on the perspective, as raising their hand.
The Briefcase Story is an inspiring talk about how Jo using her natural skills self-belief and confidence to become a successful tech entrepreneur. Using her best skills and taking an opportunity without being afraid has enabled her to prove that you don’t always need to be a natural academic high achiever to succeed.
As a woman in tech, Jo really enjoys sharing her twenty years’ experience in her sector with the next generation of students. With 85% of jobs in 2030 not even created yet, the world of technology is an exciting space to explore and work. The Briefcase Story is an inspiring story about Jo used my skills in the areas of leadership and she hopes that her story will encourage more women and girls to put their hand up for that next promotion or an opportunity without being afraid of failure. She believes that encouraging women to do this will help them to thrive in current roles or to progress to more senior management levels and help us find our next generation of female tech leaders.
In our modern world, we want to raise girls to feel they can go out into the world with their best foot forward. To do that, we need to raise our girls to believe in themselves. It may sound cheesy, but self-belief and self-esteem are crucial to raising girls to go out into the world feeling confident and resilient for what lies ahead of them. And while raising girls with high self-esteem despite their being surrounded by digitally altered images is no easy task, it is possible. In this talk, Jo shares her tips and advice on how we can take small steps to make a big difference.
Girls have an interest in STEM. However, data from Microsoft in the US showed that interest in STEM drops off when they high senior school. Could the importance of a “growth mindset” play a valuable part on whether girls will keep their interest and motivation in STEM or go for more “feminine” careers instead. Fewer girls keep their interest and motivation in science subjects, and this can translate to fewer female graduates in science, technology, and engineering fields. Could a lack of role models and gender stereotypes impact how likely girls and women are to retain their interest in STEM subjects? Could this be affecting their potential to pursue their passion for STEM in their adult life?
For instance, in 2015, a software company OneLogic launched its recruitment marketing campaign that featured an attractive female engineer. It received a massive backlash from the public. People, especially males, were complaining that this is not what an engineer would look like.
In this talk, we discuss the importance of role models and why, if they want to, everyone should have the ability to look like an engineer. Now is the time to show our students why we need more gender diversity in STEM. This is an ideal talk for National STEM Day on 8th November.
