She went to England with dreams of becoming a ballerina. She came back as an accountant and went on to rise to the top of her field. More than thirty years later, Cleo Papadopoulou holds three senior leadership roles at PwC Cyprus and is still working to open doors for more women to follow
Papadopoulou joined PwC Cyprus in 1992. At the time, she says, the partnership had around thirty members. All of them were men. When she made partner a decade later, the number had grown to thirty-three men, and her.
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She shares the story without bitterness, but with an understanding of that’s how things stood. It’s the kind of detail that explains everything that came after. In this first episode for The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus podcast, host Annetta Benzar and Cleo Papadopoulou talk openly about the pressure she felt to adapt, her struggles to find her own leadership style, and her mission (and passion) for inclusion at every level of seniority.
Papadopoulou’s path into corporate was anything but direct. She left Cyprus for the UK as a young woman with a single goal: to train as a professional ballerina. However, an injury soon ended that plan. “I couldn’t get into the Royal School of Ballet, which was my dream,” she says. “My mindset was: if I’m not going to join the best, then I’ll just do something else.” That “something else” became accountancy.
From the outside, the two worlds of dance to accountancy might sound vastly different. Papadopoulou would disagree. The same discipline, resilience and focus that is required to become a ballerina, she says, is needed to climb up the ladder of leadership in the corporate world.
Soon after joining PwC, she discovered a world built entirely by and for men. For years, she adapted to it: the dress, the manner, the model of leadership. “For a very long time I was copying them,” she admits. It took an even longer time for her to allow herself to change and give herself permission to lead as herself.
The conversation doesn’t spare the private reality behind her professional story. There were three children, a career that required nights back at the office after putting a newborn to bed, breastfeeding fitted around training schedules, and a point where something had to give. Eventually, she says, her husband stepped back from his own career so she could continue hers. “It was he who sacrificed his career so I could have mine.”
That experience made inclusion personal long before it became part of her formal role.
Today, Papadopoulou leads inclusion and diversity at PwC Cyprus, but she describes her role less as a values statement than as an argument for driving the operations of any company: when people don’t feel seen or supported, organisations bleed engagement, talent, and eventually results.
Asked what she would tell young women starting out today, her answer is to be yourself, pursue your goals, stay positive, and don’t copy anyone else.
Cleo Papadopoulou is the first guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on leadership, authenticity, motherhood, power and inclusion, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of OLOI Media and The Future Media.
