— Speaking
Keynote Speaker
For organisations serious about developing female leadership, building healthier performance cultures, and having the conversations most stages avoid.
— Trusted On The Stages That Matter
A short introduction, in my own words.
A two-minute introduction to the work, the talks, and what audiences walk away with.
Guest Keynote
Big5Digital
2026
"Laura's talk on The Hidden Tax on Female Leadership made me think differently about where I am in my life and my work. It gave me real insight, real confidence, and I wish it had been longer."
Big5Digital
Women's Day
EY
Keynote · Panel
"To the most amazing speaker and panellist, on behalf of the D&I team and EY, thank you for helping make our Women's Day celebration a huge success."
Clayton Jordy Fowlds
D&I Team, EY
H2H Workshop
Oracle
Marketing Team
"The teams thoroughly enjoyed and were engaged in your H2H workshop. They even stayed overtime. Thank you for such a fantastic session."
Cathy Stadler
Director of Marketing, Oracle
Keynote
That Brunch Club
Guest Speaker
"Laura was incredible. No one has ever explained money to me the way she did. Her stories were so real, you could hear a pin drop in the room. She really touched people."
Mpho Gumede
That Brunch Club
— Hi, I'm Laura
The honest version.
I have spent fifteen years inside the rooms where senior commercial decisions get made. I founded and ran a multi-seven-figure creative agency, and I burned out in the middle of all of it, which forced me to rebuild what I thought success was, and how it should be built.
That rebuild is what I speak about now. Not the polished version. The honest one.
Having now built The Aligned Woman Co. A company committed to ensuring women have access to vetted specialists, courses and content. I speak about why female leadership keeps stalling between mid-level and senior, despite a decade of pipeline programmes. Why ambitious women keep ending up exhausted rather than energised. Why the systems we work inside reward output and punish sustainability. And what it actually takes to build success that is honest, structured, and built to last.
I have stood on both sides of the conversation. The building, and the rebuild. That is what audiences hear.
Keynote Topics
Overt sexism has mostly left the modern workplace. Something subtler has replaced it.
When a woman demonstrates the exact traits that define strong leadership: decisiveness, authority, ambition, conviction — she is read as less likeable. Her male counterparts, demonstrating the same traits, are read as confident. Likeability then becomes a quiet input into how her competence is judged, how her promotions are decided, and how her leadership ceiling gets set.
That is the hidden tax. Most senior women have been paying it for years without naming it.
This keynote names it directly. Why is authority still penalised in women but rewarded in men? How perception bias shapes performance evaluations and promotion decisions. The psychological cost of managing how you are received in every meeting, every email, every room. And the measurable impact on innovation, retention, and the leadership pipelines most organisations claim to care about.
The talk does not flatter the audience. It gives them language for what they have been feeling, evidence for what they have been suspecting, and a structural understanding of what to do next.
We did everything right. We worked hard. We achieved. We proved ourselves. We met the milestones, climbed the ladders, built the businesses. And somewhere along the way, we forgot why we started.
We lost the purpose underneath the ambition. Which was joy. We over-function. We over-deliver. We hold everything together. And we call it strength.
But what if success without joy is not success at all?
This keynote names what most accomplished women are quietly carrying. The exhaustion that does not show up in performance reviews. The disconnection between identity and pleasure. The role the nervous system plays in determining whether high performance is sustainable or self-destructive. And how to rebuild ambition on a foundation that includes fulfilment, not just output.
The talk is not a permission slip to do less. It is a structural argument for doing it differently, and a roadmap for what comes next.
— The Aligned Woman Podcast
Watch The Aligned Woman Podcast
Real conversations with extraordinary women, on leadership, burnout, identity, wealth and joy.
Episodes coming soon.
