Helen Duce
Helen Duce is a leadership coach and diversity consultant who specialises in empowering women to advance in their careers whilst equipping senior male leaders to effectively sponsor underrepresented talent through awareness of unconscious bias.
Professional and Leadership Experience
Helen is the founder and CEO of Include Consulting, a Singapore-founded diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy. Her career began with Unilever, where she spent 12 years in marketing roles across the UK and USA. She then served as Non-Academic Director at MIT's Auto-ID Centre at Cambridge University before joining EffectiveBrands/Kantar Consulting, where she held the position of President Asia and Global Board member for a decade, including a year as CEO. Following this, she founded and led GreenOcean Group, a sustainable business consultancy, for five years before establishing Include Consulting in 2019.
Throughout her career, she has worked with C-level clients at multinational businesses including GSK, Mastercard and Fonterra, NGOs such as HarvestPlus, Omidyar Network, Food Industry Asia and CGIAR, and academic institutes including INSEAD and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Board Experience
Helen served as a Global Board member at EffectiveBrands for 10 years, leading the Asia region and HR function whilst serving as CEO for one year. She also dedicated five years as CEO and board member for Lean In Singapore, a volunteer-led non-profit organisation.
Education and Professional Training
Helen holds a BSc Honours in Marketing and Psychology from Lancaster University and an MBA from INSEAD. She is part of the Shared Value Initiative's Consulting Affiliate Network. Her professional development includes Management Drives certification in Leadership, Excellence Teams and Organisations, and completion of the Women's Empowerment Institute's Empowerment Certificate Program.
Coaching Expertise, Experience & Enthusiasms
Helen's passion centres on empowering women to advance in their careers through a philosophy that focuses not on 'fixing women' but on equipping them to recognise and navigate the bias they face. She works extensively with large multinational corporations to support women's advancement into senior leadership positions, and much of her coaching involves senior male leaders who are committed to sponsoring underrepresented talent.
Her coaching expertise spans consulting, education, finance, tech, and real estate sectors, working with C-suite executives, senior leaders, and teams. She specialises in career transition, communications, presentation skills, sponsoring underrepresented talent, and mitigating gender bias. Helen's commitment to systemic change led her to found Lean In Singapore, building it into a network of over 7,000 women focused on addressing bias and providing peer-to-peer support. She continues her advocacy work as executive consultant to INSEAD's gender initiative.
Personal Details
Helen has lived and worked across three continents and is married to an American. She lives on the edge of the Peak District with four children, a dog, two cats and eight goldfish. Her love of hiking and being in nature drew her to this location, whilst her passion for cooking and eating brings joy to family life. Embracing her ongoing mid-life adventures (crisis!), Helen is currently learning to tap dance.