Overall Winner, 2025: Catherine Faiers

Catherine has worked in many different functions, in accounting, banking, strategy, corporate development, operations, marketing and finance, and ending up as a COO, first at Addison Lee, and then joining the FTSE 100 automotive technology company Auto Trader in 2017 and progressing to COO in 2019.

She grew up in a small village in the Suffolk countryside, where she learnt the values that are core to the IMI and the Automotive 30% Club - the importance of education, inclusion, and having a strong work ethic. Her parents left school at 14 and didn’t go to university until later, studying around full-time jobs. Seeing what they’d achieved helped her to realise that success comes from studying and working hard. This led her to achieving a first-class honours in Economics at Durham University, and more recently, securing a scholarship on the London Business School Senior Executive Programme, funded by the Global 30% Club.

Catherine is passionate about social mobility, inclusion and gender balance, and is a Patron of the Automotive 30% Club. She is the executive sponsor for Auto Trader’s ethnicity network and provides mentoring and sponsorship for women, especially those who have an intersectional characteristic that creates barriers to their career progression. She volunteers with the Social Mobility Foundation, mentoring young women from East London, and is a Business Mentor with the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women. She recently started investing in female founders through a women’s angel investor network, to tackle the issue that only 3% of Venture Capital funding goes to women.

Last year she spearheaded a new initiative called “Great Events for All” to ensure that industry events are safe and inclusive for everybody. This has included a collaboration with the Automotive 30% Club and a company called Consent Collective to educate the industry on sexual harassment and consent, fully funding interactive sessions for automotive people. The initiative also included the creation of a free guide to ensure events were more inclusive.

The Founder of the Automotive 30% Club Julia Muir said:

“Catherine truly embodies what it is to be an Inspiring Automotive Woman. She promotes her company as an employer of choice for women, creates solutions to help women thrive in the workplace, and raises awareness of intersectionality and underrepresented female groups. She takes part in inclusion networks, mentors and coaches female colleagues, is an inspirational female role model, and an outstanding trailblazer. If that wasn't enough, this amazing woman is a senior executive driving positive change not only in her own company, but also across the automotive sector and in wider business and society. I would like to say a personal thank you to Catherine for her unwavering commitment to the Automotive 30% Club’s purpose of building high performing gender-balanced teams from all possible talent pools.”

A private reception for all the Inspiring Automotive Women Award winners, attended by many industry leaders, was held before the main dinner event and Julia Muir presented them with their awards.

When asked how she felt about winning her Inspiring Automotive Woman of the Year award, Catherine said:

“It feels amazing. It’s been such an inspiring evening hearing all the stories of the incredible winners tonight. The future of automotive is bright with all these incredible women at the heart of it.”

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