Every so often you come across someone whose career makes you stop and rethink what one person can actually shift. Cynthia V Davis CBE is one of those people. She did not set out to become a household name in diversity and inclusion circles, nor did she chase the awards that now fill her biography. What she wanted was simpler and far more stubborn: a fairer world of work, built deliberately rather than left to chance. Over the past decade she has turned that personal conviction into a genuine business movement, and along the way she has become one of the most recognisable voices in the UK conversation about equality at work. This is the story of how she got there, what she built, and why it matters.
Who Is Cynthia Davis?
Cynthia V Davis is a British entrepreneur, diversity and inclusion specialist, and international speaker, best known as the founder and chief executive of Diversifying Group. If you have spent any time around the UK’s equality, diversity and inclusion sector, her name has almost certainly come up. She is the kind of leader who manages to be both warm and uncompromising at the same time, the sort who will sit on a conference panel and gently but firmly tell a room of executives that good intentions are not the same as good outcomes. A woman of colour who spent years inside the recruitment industry, she eventually decided that watching the system from the inside was no longer enough, and that she would rather build a better version of it herself.
From Recruitment Desk to Founder’s Chair
Long before she was a chief executive, Cynthia learned the recruitment trade the hard way, working her way up through senior consulting roles. She cut her teeth as a senior consultant at Ellis Fairbank, then moved into a senior talent acquisition role at Best Buy Europe back in 2006, where she was responsible for hiring across a sprawling range of head office and professional functions. Those years gave her something that no business course could: a granular, first-hand understanding of how hiring decisions actually get made, and crucially, who tends to get overlooked when they are made on autopilot. With nearly two decades of hands-on recruitment experience behind her, she understood the machinery of talent acquisition intimately, and she understood its blind spots even better.
The Birth of Diversifying Group
In 2015, Cynthia did something that most people only talk about doing. She walked away from a secure and successful recruitment career to start her own company, and she did it with a newborn baby in tow. The motivation was deeply personal. Looking at her infant daughter, she thought about the obstacles the little girl might one day face, being judged on her gender, paid less than male peers, or having her ethnicity quietly held against her, and she decided she was not willing to be a bystander. That decision became Diversifying Group, a diversity and inclusion services organisation built to make the world of work more open, more accountable, and more genuinely inclusive. What began at a kitchen table buried under to-do lists and nappy bags has since grown into a respected fixture of the British EDI landscape.
Why “BAME Recruitment” Became Something Bigger
It is worth remembering that the business did not start life under its current polished name. Cynthia originally launched it as BAME Recruitment, a direct nod to the historic marginalisation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in the UK workforce. The name said exactly what it was on the tin, and at the time it served an important purpose by naming the problem plainly. As the company matured, though, so did its ambitions, and the rebrand to Diversifying Group reflected a broader mission that stretched well beyond any single community. The new identity signalled a shift from a niche recruitment specialist to a full-service partner offering inclusive recruitment, executive search, recruitment marketing, training, events, and consultancy. In other words, the company grew up, and its name grew with it.
Diversifying Jobs and the Power of Representation
By 2019, Cynthia had spotted another gap and moved to fill it, co-founding Diversifying Jobs, a collection of inclusive job boards designed to connect diverse jobseekers with employers who actually mean what they say about inclusion. It was a smart, practical extension of the core mission, because all the consultancy advice in the world means little if underrepresented candidates never see the right opportunities in the first place. The platform sits under the wider Diversifying Group umbrella and includes specialist boards such as Diversifying Leadership, which focuses specifically on increasing representation in management and senior roles, the very places where diversity tends to thin out fastest. It is a neat illustration of how Cynthia thinks: identify exactly where the pipeline breaks, then build the tool that fixes it.
A B Corp With a Backbone
One detail that genuinely sets Cynthia’s businesses apart is their B Corp status, and not just as a badge. Diversifying Group is the highest scoring Black-founded B Corp in the UK, which places it within a global community of companies held to rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. That distinction matters, because the EDI sector has more than its fair share of organisations happy to talk a good game without much substance underneath. By tying her business to an independent, demanding certification, Cynthia effectively put her money where her mouth is. It signals to clients and critics alike that this is a values-led company willing to be measured against external benchmarks rather than its own marketing copy.
The CBE and What It Really Recognises
In 2023, Cynthia’s work was formally recognised at the highest level when she was awarded a CBE by King Charles for her exceptional services to equality, diversity and inclusion. A CBE is no small thing, and in her case it reads less like a polite nod and more like a national acknowledgement that the work she has been doing for years carries real weight. What I find telling is that the honour was for services to EDI specifically, rather than simply for business success. It frames her contribution as a public good, recognising the cumulative effect of a decade spent nudging, challenging, and equipping British organisations to hire and operate more fairly. For someone who started out wanting to change one little girl’s future, having that work stamped with a royal honour is a remarkable arc.
More Than a Boardroom: Charity and Mentorship
Cynthia’s influence extends well beyond her own companies, and her board roles reveal a lot about what she cares about. She serves as a trustee at Over The Wall, a UK children’s charity, lending her time and credibility to a cause that has nothing to do with her commercial interests. She has also chaired the board of Pop Up, a social enterprise devoted to making reading, writing and storytelling something children from every background can value and enjoy. There is a clear thread running through these commitments, a belief that opportunity should be widened at every stage of life, starting young. She is, on top of all this, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a leadership fellow of St George’s College in Windsor, both of which speak to the seriousness with which her peers regard her.
The Speaker, the Mentor, the Role Model
If you have ever seen Cynthia on a stage, you will know she does not deliver the bland, box-ticking diversity talk that audiences have learned to tune out. She is a genuinely compelling public speaker, regularly appearing on panels, leading workshops, and giving keynotes where she draws on her own journey to make the abstract feel personal. She has spoken at initiatives such as the City of London’s drive to bring more women into digital strategy, and she has shared her story with hundreds of underrepresented young people through future leaders programmes. Away from the spotlight, she mentors young people from ethnically diverse backgrounds, putting in the unglamorous, one-to-one work that rarely makes a press release but often changes a life. That combination of big-stage influence and quiet, individual investment is part of what makes her so respected.
Awards That Tell a Story
The trophy shelf, frankly, is impressive, and the awards trace the rise of both her profile and her cause. She was named Professional Business Woman of the Year back in 2016, picked up Influencer of the Year in 2018, and was repeatedly nominated as one of Computer Weekly’s Most Inspirational Women in Tech between 2020 and 2023. More recently she collected the Women-Led Business of the Year award at the British Business Awards in 2023 and was crowned Inspirational Woman of the Year in 2024 by the Black Tech Achievement Awards. What is striking is not the sheer number of accolades but their consistency over time. This is not a flash-in-the-pan moment of recognition; it is a sustained pattern of the industry repeatedly pointing at the same person and saying, that one, she is doing it right.
What Makes Her Approach Different
Plenty of people work in diversity and inclusion, so what actually distinguishes Cynthia? In my view, it comes down to credibility plus practicality. Because she spent years inside recruitment, she speaks the language of hiring managers and understands the commercial pressures they face, which means her advice never feels naive or purely idealistic. At the same time, her personal stake in the mission keeps the work honest, since this was never an abstract cause for her but a response to the world she wanted her daughter to inherit. She pairs that authenticity with hard infrastructure, real job boards, real training, real B Corp accountability, so that the message is backed by mechanisms rather than slogans. That blend of lived experience, industry fluency, and tangible tools is rare, and it is precisely why her work has had staying power.
FAQs
Who is Cynthia Davis?
Cynthia V Davis CBE is a British entrepreneur, diversity and inclusion specialist, and international speaker, best known as the founder and CEO of Diversifying Group, a values-led organisation working to make UK workplaces fairer and more inclusive.
What is Diversifying Group, and when did Cynthia Davis found it?
Cynthia Davis founded the company in 2015, originally launching it as BAME Recruitment before rebranding to Diversifying Group. Today it offers inclusive recruitment, executive search, training, events, and consultancy, and is the highest scoring Black-founded B Corp in the UK.
Why did Cynthia Davis receive a CBE?
She was awarded a CBE by King Charles in 2023 for her exceptional services to equality, diversity and inclusion, recognising a decade of work helping British organisations hire and operate more fairly.
What did Cynthia Davis do before becoming a founder?
Before starting her own business, she spent nearly two decades in recruitment, working as a senior consultant at Ellis Fairbank and later as a senior talent acquisition consultant at Best Buy Europe from 2006.
What else is Cynthia Davis involved in beyond her business?
Alongside Diversifying Group, she co-founded Diversifying Jobs, serves as a trustee at children’s charity Over The Wall, has chaired the board of literacy enterprise Pop Up, and mentors young people from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
Conclusion
Cynthia V Davis CBE represents something refreshingly grounded in a field that can sometimes drift into jargon and gesture. She took a deeply personal worry about her daughter’s future and turned it into a decade-long, award-winning campaign to make British workplaces fairer, building a B Corp-certified business, an inclusive jobs platform, and a national reputation along the way. Her story is a reminder that meaningful change rarely arrives in one dramatic moment; more often it is built patiently, decision by decision, by someone unwilling to accept that things have to stay the way they are. Whether you encounter her as a founder, a speaker, a trustee, or a mentor, the throughline is the same, a determination to widen the door for the people too often left standing outside it. As the conversation around equality at work continues to evolve, Cynthia Davis looks set to remain one of its most authentic and influential voices for a long time to come.