Lisel Engelbrecht

After five minutes of chatting to Lisel Engelbrecht, I like her immensely. It would probably take the same amount of time to dislike her, if you disapprove of women who are feisty, cutting, opinionated, and caustically funny. Sad as it sounds, some people don’t appreciate that in a woman.

“I do think I’m an acquired taste for most individuals,” agrees Engelbrecht, the CIO of data engineering and AI for Standard Bank. “I’m not a conformist, and I’m not here to climb the corporate ladder. If something needs to be said, they’ll bring me into the meeting because they all know I’ll say it! I have been told I’m too assertive. If I was a man, I’d be ‘the man’, but because I’m a woman, I’m too assertive, I suppose.”