Sylvia Ann Hewlett's life has a heroic arc, from Welsh coal mining village to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she lives with her husband and youngest daughter. Along the way she’s busted through many barriers: earning a PhD in economics at a time when only seven percent of recipients were women and becoming the first woman to head up the Economic Policy Council.

A graduate of Cambridge University, Sylvia won a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University and earned her PhD at London University. Subsequently she held faculty positions at Barnard College, Princeton University and Columbia University where she headed up the “Gender and Policy” specialization at the School of International and Public Affairs. In recent years she’s co-led the Columbia Business School’s “Women and Leadership” conference.

In mid-life Sylvia became an entrepreneur, founding the Center for Talent Innovation (Coqual), a global think tank, and a consulting firm, Hewlett Consulting Partners, which in 2017, made The Economist’s top ten list. Both enterprises focus on recruiting, retaining and progressing high performing talent across the divides of gender, race, sexual orientation and culture.

Sylvia is also a prominent author. She has written twenty critically acclaimed books, including A Lesser Life, a New York Times Notable Book, When the Bough Breaks, winner of a RFK Memorial Book Award, The War Against Parents, co-authored with Cornel West, Executive Presence: The Missing link between Merit and Success an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor, a Financial Times Book of the Month. Her memoir Breaking Brave, will be published by Pegasus Books in December 2026. Sylvia’s books have been translated into seven languages including Mandarin and Arabic. She is the most published author in the Harvard Business Review, the recipient of Google’s Global Diversity Award, and been named “Woman of the Year” by Glamour Magazine and the Financial Women’s Association. She has also been profiled in the New York Times, Financial Times and People magazine.

A frequent guest on television, Sylvia has appeared on Oprah, 60 minutes, Panorama, PBS NewsHour and been lampooned on Saturday Night live. She is an influencer on LinkedIn where she has 137,000 followers. A talk she gave at Google on her book Executive Presence has been viewed 288,000 times on YouTube.

Sylvia has spoken at Davos, the Mobile World Congress and the White House. Over the last twelve months she has keynoted leadership events hosted by Citi, MGM Resorts, and the Yale Medical School, amongst others.  Her 2024 article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “The New Rules of Executive Presence” was one of the ten most-read articles published by HBR that year.

Sylvia is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association.  She also serves on the board of the Limon Dance Foundation.