Based in Melbourne, Divya Pasupuleti leads Business Strategy and Transformation at nbn Australia, driving enterprise-wide programs that shape how millions of Australians connect to the digital economy. Alongside this, she volunteers as co-chair of nbn’s Cultural Diversity Strategy and has led the company’s Gender Equity Strategy. Beyond the corporate sector, she serves as President and Board Chair of the Project Management Institute Melbourne Chapter, sits on the boards of Gender Equity Victoria, the Australian Gender Equality Council, Melbourne Forum, and Afghan Women on the Move, and is an advisory member to the Victorian Multicultural Commission.

The thread connecting it all is a conviction she returns to often:

Strategy and inclusion are inseparable

Ask Divya how leading business transformation relates to her diversity work and she pushes back on the premise. “Strategy and inclusion are not separate disciplines,” she says. “They are inseparable.” Diversity sharpens strategy, she argues, because it surfaces blind spots and brings lived experience into spaces that have traditionally been abstract and technical. “When diversity informs strategy, we stop building for the average user and start building for real people, with real barriers and aspirations. That is how digital transformation becomes a force for equity, not just efficiency.”

At nbn, that philosophy has produced tangible reform. As Chair of the Cultural Diversity Strategy and Program Lead for Gender Equity, she introduced the organisation’s first gender data dashboard, reformed life-stage policies on pregnancy, parental leave, and menopause, and normalised flexible work for more than 6,000 staff; lifting women’s progression into leadership and opening pathways for culturally diverse talent.

Expanding who gets to lead

As a migrant woman of colour in STEM, Divya has navigated spaces where the expectations of leadership were rarely built with her in mind. It has sharpened rather than diminished her ambition. “Throughout my career, I have witnessed talented people overlooked — not for lack of capability, but because they did not fit expectations of leadership,” she says. “That reality has shaped a commitment to changing systems so difference is recognised as strength.”

She has personally clocked more than 350 mentoring hours supporting women in the community, and the advice she gives most often is blunt in the best way: do not wait to be chosen. “Too many talented women and culturally diverse professionals are taught, subtly or overtly, to be grateful, to stay quiet, to let their work speak for itself,” she says. “But visibility is not ego. It is leadership. If people do not know who you are and what you bring, they cannot advocate for you.” She encourages emerging leaders to seek stretch opportunities before they feel ready, and to own their ambition out loud. “Confidence is not something you wait for. It is something you build by stepping forward.”

For organisations, good intentions are not enough. Real change, she says, requires sponsorship rather than just mentoring, transparent criteria for progression, and leaders who actively open doors. “When organisations shift from passive support to active advocacy, diversity in leadership stops being an aspiration and starts becoming inevitable.”

DEI as DNA, not a tick box

Divya is clear-eyed about the gap between how organisations talk about diversity and what they actually do. The myth she most wants to dismantle is the belief that DEI is already being done in any meaningful sense. “Many leaders genuinely think DEI is a priority, when in reality it often sits as a side ambition. A tick box,” she says. True inclusion is not a standalone program. It is embedded in how decisions are made, how opportunity is distributed, and how leaders are measured and rewarded. At PMI Melbourne’s Women in Project Management program, she has helped achieve 42 per cent female mentors and mentees and lift female volunteers from 21 to 33 per cent. At Arts Assist, she helped double the representation of women on the board. “My focus has been on turning advocacy into action,” she says, “through mentoring, sponsorship, policies, and reshaping structures so diversity is not only present at decision-making tables but appreciated.”

From intention to action

As 2026 gets underway, Divya is leading the Australian Gender Equality Council’s flagship annual Member Forum, a gathering of the peak national body representing more than 25 organisations and over 500,000 women in the workplace. She has also recently joined the boards of Gender Equity Victoria and Melbourne Forum, two organisations positioned to shape policy and systems change across the state.

The theme she wants to carry into this season is the shift from intention to action: how leadership across business, government, and community can move beyond advocacy and redesign structures so equity is not an initiative but an outcome. She accepts her Award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership, she says, on behalf of the communities and collaborators who made the work possible.