Her Story
About Louise
Louise Davis is a professional with extensive experience across multiple fields in health and childcare. Beginning her career as a classical ballet dancer, she transitioned into nursing and epidemiology before serving as CEO of a UK college for early childhood education for 20 years. During this time, she worked with a parliamentary committee to extend maternity leave from 12 weeks to one year and co-founded Parents at Work to support working parents. After moving to the United States 26 years ago, Davis retrained and completed a master's degree in health education and Chinese medicine. She then established and ran her own acupuncture practice for 10 years. She attributes her success to the determination developed after becoming a widow while pregnant with her first child. Davis values truthfulness and ethics in her work and advises that careers are not linear, emphasizing the importance of seizing opportunities, teamwork among women, and bringing about change through negotiation. She continues to influence others by mentoring younger women and advocating for universal healthcare and quality childcare.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Louise
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would have to say that I was brought up in, I was a doctor's daughter. I was in a fairly privileged position in the north of England. And it was a very protected environment. I married a doctor who sadly died when I was pregnant with my first child. And I attribute my success to suddenly realize that I've been a dependent daughter, and I was a dependent wife. As a pregnant widow, I decided I had to suddenly take responsibility for my unborn child and myself. And it ended up completely new world.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've received would be that your career is not necessarily a straight line. It's about seizing opportunity when it presents. Maximizing on that opportunity. Sometimes people believe that when they're graduated college, that their life is now set. And in fact, that's not my experience in my own life. I've changed careers many times. The theme is determination, making the best and working the hardest I can, but trying to bring about change in a particularly female way, in other words, by bringing about change by negotiation, rather than trying to get to the post the fastest. So I think it's very important that women work as a team and that every part of that team is part of achieving the goal. No woman does it by herself.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Truthfulness and ethics. Yeah, I mean, I find that we increasingly live in an unethical world. And many of, many research projects are not well thought out because people haven't thought of the ethical consequences of these decisions. I mean, you can use the thing that everybody's talking about at the moment, like AI. But also, you can look at the things I remember many years ago, when I was a midwife, when IVF was the new thing that women could have enable women who couldn't have children to have children. And I remember having a discussion with some colleagues more senior to me about what the ethical consequences of this might be.
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