Throughout her time at Kinetic, Nicole has dedicated herself to helping both male and female staff understand the challenges faced by women in the workplace. Using her extensive network of industry peers, she regularly arranges for speakers to present to the business on a broad range of diversity and inclusion topics, whilst also championing a dedicated training programme for female staff on topics such as leadership, effective communication and empowerment. From her experiences returning to work following maternity leave, Nicole has worked with Kinetic’s Talent team to develop a programme to help returning mothers settle back into the workplace – she also wrote a blog for IWD on this subject. In 2017, Nicole broadened her focus to help improve working conditions for women across the wider industry. She established “Balance”, a diversity and inclusion network for Out Of Home advertising, with the ambition of inspiring women to stay in the sector longer and attract a more diverse range of talent. Balance regularly publishes on a range of topics, and has also hosted three industry conferences focused on educating leaders and senior managers on how to understand unconscious biases and the impact of improving processes and business cultures to create a more diverse and empowering workplace. Looking ahead, a new event is planned, aimed at breaking the silence on some of the more challenging issues specifically faced by women in the workplace, such as miscarriage, infertility and menopause – overcoming taboos and showing our industry how to better support women in order to keep them succeeding.