Witad Awards 2020: Gender equality/diversity professional of the year (end-user)—Wincie Wong, RBS/NatWest

Wincie Wong wins the gender equality/diversity professional of the year (end-user) category at this year’s Women in Technology and Data Awards. With over a decade at NatWest (formerly Royal Bank of Scotland), Wong has a history of working across technology, digital, and innovation. She is currently responsible for leading the implementation of the Rose Review on behalf of the bank, commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury. In partnership with the government and other banks, Wong and her team are tasked with delivering on the initiatives of the review that seeks to resolve gender inequality in female entrepreneurship in the UK by working to add 600,000 female entrepreneurs by 2030.

“We found in the research that only one in three entrepreneurships in the UK are led by women and if we were to get women to start, sustain and scale their businesses at the same rate as men, we would add an additional £250 billion ($306 billion) to the UK economy,” Wong says.

Beyond finance, Wong has an impressive track record of pushing for gender equality in technology. She co-founded the NatWest Girls Can Code group to help women in the bank develop coding skills. She also founded the annual Growing Inclusive Leadership in Tech conferences in London and Edinburgh, attended by hundreds of attendees each year. In 2019, Wong and her colleague Burcu Karabork started the NatWest Technically Speaking podcast, which covers a variety of topics and had over 14,000 downloads and listens in its first few months.

While Wong was leading initiatives and attending conferences, she also had the opportunity to meet a variety of women technologists in the industry, which led her to become a founding member of the Tech She Can Charter group, which has grown from 18 to over 140 signatories over the last two years, including names such as PwC, Tesco, Credit Suisse, and Rolls Royce. Under her leadership of the Charter group, she also launched the Enrich Education initiative, which helps increase the number of women in tech roles.