The BPW UK National Conference 2025 took place on April 4th and 5th, 2025, offering both in-person and virtual attendance options. This annual gathering is a cornerstone event for Business and Professional Women UK (BPW UK), an organization dedicated to developing the professional and leadership potential of women across various sectors.
Affiliated with BPW International, BPW UK leverages a global network to advocate for women’s empowerment through education, mentoring, networking, and skill-building initiatives. The conference theme, “Bridge to the Future,” emphasized building connections and strategies to navigate the evolving professional landscape.
The Organization Behind the Conference
It is worth understanding what sits behind an event like this, because BPW is frequently mistaken for a modern professional networking group. It is considerably older than that.
The International Federation of Business and Professional Women was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, on 26 August 1930 by Dr. Lena Madesin Phillips, an American lawyer from Kentucky. The founding member countries were Austria, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States. Phillips served as its first president until 1947.
Today BPW International holds consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and participatory status with the Council of Europe, with affiliates in more than 100 countries across five continents.
Consider the context. In 1930, women in most of these founding countries had held the vote for barely a decade, and in several professions were still formally barred from practice. Building an international federation of professional women in that environment was not a networking exercise. It was an argument about who counted as a professional at all.
Why These Gatherings Still Matter
A reasonable question is whether a conference changes anything, or whether it is a pleasant weekend that leaves the structures intact.
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what people do with the connections afterward. But the underlying need is not in doubt. Progress toward leadership parity has stalled: representation in senior leadership rose fewer than three percentage points across the decade to 2025, women hold roughly 19% of chief executive roles, and the share of women among new senior appointments has fallen for three consecutive years after peaking in 2022.
That is not a problem individual ambition solves. It is a problem of access—to information, to opportunity, and above all to advocacy. Which is precisely what a functioning network provides and what an isolated career cannot manufacture.
What to Actually Take From an Event Like This
Having spoken at and attended a great many of these gatherings, I would offer this: the value is rarely in the sessions. It is in what you do in the three weeks afterward.
- Networking with intent. Collecting contacts achieves nothing. Leaving with three people you have a specific reason to speak to again achieves a great deal.
- Skill development that gets used. A workshop insight has a shelf life of about a fortnight unless it is applied to something real immediately.
- Advocacy and awareness. Discussion of workplace barriers is only useful if someone carries it back into an organization with the standing to act on it.
- Global perspective. BPW UK’s affiliation with BPW International means local conversations connect to a genuinely international body of experience—including jurisdictions that have solved problems the UK is still debating.
Sarah Slaven, Managing Director of Business Durham, was among the speakers, bringing insight into regional business development and innovation.
Bridge to the Future
The theme was well chosen. A bridge is not a destination and it is not a celebration of the far bank. It is infrastructure—unglamorous, load-bearing, and useful only because someone built it before it was needed.
That is a fair description of what organizations like BPW have been doing since 1930, and of what still needs doing. The work is not finished, and the recent numbers suggest it cannot be left to look after itself.
For details of upcoming events and membership, visit BPW International.
Background on BPW’s founding is drawn from BPW International. Leadership parity figures draw on the World Economic Forum’s research on gender parity in senior leadership.
Related reading: Leadership 50/50: Why We’re Not There Yet—and What Must Change Now and BPW Europe 2025: Celebrate Our Superpowers in Malta, or browse the full Insights archive.