Eleanor Mills

Eleanor Mills is the former Editorial Director of The Sunday Times and one of Britain’s most high profile commentators. In March of 2021 she launched an online community platform for women called Noon. When writing for The Sunday Times she was particularly loved for her writing on women, work and the ongoing gender revolution. Her columns and reporting on the effects of internet pornography on young people, the need for more sex education and for a more open approach to sexuality has changed the national debate. As has her groundbreaking work on Female Genital Mutilation, where the Sunday Times caught a practitioner in the act and had him struck off. In January 2014 she became Chair of Women in Journalism, the industry’s cross media network for female hacks, and launched a series of high profile events on media sexism and empowering women.

For ten years Eleanor edited the News Review section of The Sunday Times where she was responsible for running the broadsheet’s unparalleled features, comment and analysis coverage. She then moved to The Times, where, as the paper’s Saturday Editor, she relaunched the Saturday edition creating six new sections. During her long Fleet Street career, Eleanor has been the Sunday Times’s main interviewer – interrogating everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to Banksy – as well as running the paper’s main News coverage of the major events of the week. At only 26, she was the Daily Telegraph’s youngest ever Features Editor and she began her journalistic life on the Guardian and Observer (having been rescued by Alan Rusbridger from a stint at Tank World “the world’s premier bulk-liquid, transportation, publication”).

Eleanor won the 2012 International Alliance of women’s World of Difference Award for her “contribution to women’s economic empowerment” and was one of only four journalists in Europe to be shortlisted for Journalist of the Year at the European Diversity Awards 2012. She was recently nominated for Feature Writer of the Year for her long-form articles for the Sunday Times Magazine. Alongside the 30% Club’s Helena Morrissey, she is a UK Director of the influential New York based think-tank the Centre for Talent Innovation, run by Sylvia Ann Hewlett which uses award-winning research to advise the world’s top companies (including Goldman Sachs, Intel, Unilever and Google) on diversity.

Eleanor appears regularly on television – you can catch her most weeks on ITV and on Sky News reviewing the newspapers and commentating on politics and society. She also broadcasts on radio – including You and Yours, Woman’s Hour and commentary on many other national and regional programmes.

As well as writing for the Sunday Times, she is currently working on a new book Birds and the Bees: 2.0, Talking Sex with Generation XXX, with Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded. Her publications include Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: An Anthology of the best Journalism by Women, published by Constable.