Sandra Dawson has often surprised even herself by the jobs she has taken on throughout her career. The result has been a rich mix of UK-based academic, government, and business roles where, as a woman, she has often been one of a small minority.

Dawson started in 1968 as a British civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, focusing on surveys of employment practices. Although she enjoyed the work, she says she found the lack of competition and determination dismaying and soon moved to Imperial College, attracted by a one-year position with someone whose research she greatly admired: Joan Woodward, an industrial sociologist. Dawson studied communications in the postal service and the organization of work in prisons.

Pursuing her interest in social research and a policy of not saying no when asked to take on something new, at Imperial she chaired a workplace nursery and was a director of an investment trust. She later became a professor of organization at the University of London; the director of Cambridge University’s Judge Business School; the Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and thus the first woman to head a Cambridge college founded originally for men; and a member of the boards of...