Witad Awards 2020: Gender Equality/Diversity Professional of the Year (Vendor)—Pamela Hutchinson, Bloomberg

Heads: law firm. Tails: Goldman Sachs. It was a flipped quarter that decided Pamela Hutchinson’s fate when she received two competing job offers in 1998. Having finished her law education two years earlier and working as an employment law advisor in the UK, she was well on her way to being a lawyer. But a series of twists and turns in the interim—which began with sitting outside her company’s HR office and happening upon an article titled “Managing Diversity and Inclusion: A First for the UK“—culminated in a surprise: Goldman Sachs wanted Hutchinson to help its diversity and inclusion programs, particularly around campus recruiting. She was torn.

“I flipped the coin, and it landed on Goldman. And I thought ‘Aw, what the hell? I’ll go to Goldman for a couple of years, and if I hate it, I’ll go back to being a lawyer,” she recalls, along with her mother’s scolding for leaving her career choice up to a 25-cent piece of metal. 

Fast-forward two decades. Today, Hutchinson is Bloomberg LP’s global head of diversity and inclusion, taking home the award for the gender equality/diversity professional of the year (vendor) category in WatersTechnology’s Women in Technology and Data Awards.

Looking back, she’s glad the coin landed as it did. She has been regional head of diversity at a variety of institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Northern Trust and Bloomberg, before receiving a promotion (from former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, himself) to run the department globally in 2018. At the same time, Hutchinson is a trustee for the Inspiring Leadership Trust, a volunteer organization that promotes and mobilizes selected charities and projects for the benefit of vulnerable women and children around the globe.

Despite having “fallen” into her line of work, she found she was passionate about it early on, Hutchinson says.

“I felt my purpose was to do this work,” she says. “I think if the coin had landed on heads, and I had ended up doing the other legal job, I might have been passionate for it for a little while, but the passion would have waned, and then there would have been no purpose.”

—RN