Dame Sharon White

Baroness White of Tufnell Park, DBE, Dame Sharon Michele White, born 21 April 1967 in East London, is Senior Managing Director and Head of Global Affairs at the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), appointed effective January 2025 and promoted to her current role later that year. She is one of the most recognised British leaders of her generation, having served as Second Permanent Secretary at HM Treasury (2013, 2015, overseeing the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and the first Black person in that post), Chief Executive of Ofcom (2015, 2019), and Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership (2020, 2024). White was born in Leyton to Jamaican parents of the Windrush generation, attended Connaught School for Girls and Leyton Senior High School for Girls, and read economics at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with a subsequent MSc from University College London. Her 25-year civil service career before 2014 spanned HM Treasury, the British Embassy in Washington, the No.10 Policy Unit under Blair, the World Bank, Director General at the Department for International Development (2003, 2009), and senior positions at the Ministry of Justice and Department for Work and Pensions. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours, topped the 2023 Powerlist of the 100 most influential Black Britons, and was created a life peer sitting as a crossbencher in July 2025. She is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, Non-Executive Director of Barratt Developments, Non-Executive Chair of Frontier Economics, and on the board of Sadler’s Wells Theatre. She married economist Robert Chote in 1997. White appeared on OTA Live Season 1 with Sir Charles Bowman, in a conversation that spans her Windrush-generation upbringing, her Treasury and Ofcom careers, her chairmanship of John Lewis Partnership, and her framework for leadership and diversity. This profile is an analyst-rated Leadership Index draft produced under the methodology introduced in Version 4.0 of the AI Future-Proofing Strategy.