Accelerate Action International Women's Day 2025

This blog was adapted from a presentation given at an International Women's Day event on 7th March 2025 in Carlisle. The theme is how we can accelerate change.

BECBC was born out of nuclear, which is well known for being a male dominated industry and I worked on Sellafield projects for around 5 years from 2015-2021 so this talk was about being a female lead in a male dominated environment which got me thinking about my career. Over time I’ve worked in both male and female dominated sectors and had good and bad experiences in both.

Growing up I was an only child and would you believe a very shy child! I remember when we moved home my mum had to come out with me to get me to play with the other kids on the street because I was so shy. Certainly not the person I am now who enjoys being in front of a room full of people! As a child I wasn’t really aware that the system held some additional barriers for me because I was female or indeed that it would hold even more because I was born on a council estate (I'm a proud Mirehouse lass if you're wondering). When I was 3 the Equal Pay Act came in & just as I started becoming aware of those barriers we got our first female Prime Minister. So that was it right? We’d sorted it & the following generations of women were going to have equal opportunities.

50 years on

So why decades later was I experiencing a workplace where all too often I was the only woman in the room? Where it was nearly always a man leading the meeting and only ever asking women to take the notes of the meeting?

I’m still being told more than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act and almost 40 years after Maggie became PM that I just have to be patient, as a direct quote someone said to me “the dinosaurs will die out and the younger generation get it” Yet in the world around me I see more misogyny online, particularly from young men, I see developed countries that still have never elected a female leader and I still see women still bearing the majority of the unpaid work whether it’s through housework or caring for family.

But while I have experienced some toxic masculinity in the workplace I’ve experienced far more male ally support. While that misogyny often shouts louder the men who understand that an equal opportunities workplace operates better get on quietly with helping to make that happen and I still firmly believe that those men are in the majority.

So if I’m right and the majority of men and women believe in equal workplaces what can we do to make sure that happens? Here’s a few things to think about

Better conversations

It feels like we don’t have conversations about equality anymore, we have arguments. We lost all the nuance. While there are barriers for women and for people of colour it’s not as simple as all white men have an advantage. In fact the group that struggles most is working class white men, look at a recent report called the Lost Boys by the Centre for Social Justice, yet they’re being perpetually told that they’re entitled and have benefitted from some advantage they’ve never felt. Now I actually think nuclear has a great story to tell here because, while historically it hasn’t done well on gender, many of the leaders of nuclear companies come from working class families on council estates and have progressed through apprenticeships rather than through university. We don’t get many from Eton in nuclear put it that way!

So how can we have better conversations? First up it feels like too often people are looking to take offence. If someone opens a door for me that feels like a polite considerate thing to do, it’s something I do for others and I’ve had both men and women do it for me. I question what we’re achieving if we make a man feel bad for opening a door for a woman.

On the other hand remember me mentioning the note taking in meetings? Now if note taking is part of the woman’s role that’s absolutely fine but in the instances I was seeing it wasn’t, these women were in roles where that wasn’t in their job description, anymore than it was in the men's that were in the meeting room too.

So how did I handle it? I caught the individual privately and talked about the fact that I’d noticed something they probably weren’t even aware of but that could be making people in the meeting feel uncomfortable. He hadn’t realised as things had been like that all his working life and he made sure in future meetings that the note taking was circulated.

I was also reading a reflection by Lisa Quast of a time when she was in a global meeting as a vice president and 2 men who came into the room ordered their coffees with her. When she explained who she was he was worried he’d get fired but she suggested they all go to the coffee machine together & talk about the cultural and unintended bias behind his actions. Moving forward he used his experience to challenge others making the same assumption because she had a conversation rather than becoming angry. A conversation created a male ally who went on to develop other male allies.

As an aside let’s also acknowledge that jobs that are female dominated, admin, care, cleaning etc are often undervalued in our society, for me admin roles are often the oil in the machine of business so this isn’t about saying admin is a menial job- it is saying tasks should be role appropriate regardless of gender and none of us should make assumptions about anyone based on gender.

Standing out in a crowd can be an advantage-embrace & use it

Now you may notice I have bright hair (letting you into a secret it’s not natural, I’m actually quite a dull brown) and I often wear bright clothing. One of the things I realised was that I was going to stand out in a room full of men in suits (as was the case when I came into nuclear) so why not embrace it?

Now it’s important that this fits you, it’s potentially harder to do if you’re an introvert but I know some people who’ve successfully done that-it’s that piece about knowing who you really are and being proud of it.

Struggle to stand up for yourself?

One of the biggest turning points for me was when I realised that if I let things pass without questioning them I wasn’t just letting myself down I was letting down the next generation of women, my daughter, my granddaughters and also my sons and grandsons because they all deserve a world where things work better. It was at that point that I approached things as standing up for others rather than for myself. I genuinely think that a more inclusive workplace is better for most people.

One of the things I’ve seen much more since Covid is men not worrying about saying I need to do the school run because working from home meant they were around their families more and there’s been a shift there. Previously they worried that saying they needed an hour out to do something with their children would impact negatively on their career, that they’d be seen as less committed and you know what? They were probably right because that’s exactly what happened to women, and still sometimes does.

Win together-build a community

We often talk about the battle or race for equality but that language indicates there are winners and losers. Those white working class men that I spoke about earlier aren’t facing more barriers because women are getting more opportunities in the workplace, but while things have slowly improved for women they haven’t improved for those boys born onto council estates.

I honestly don't believe that those people who’ve been to Eton & Harrow have more opportunities because they have a better education, they have more opportunities because they have connections with people who are already powerful. It could be their family, it could be alumni of their school, it could be friends of the family. We have to build our own connections, build our own community who share our values and believe, as I do, that removing barriers for women removes barriers for others who don’t have the same access to opportunity too.

Equality of opportunity isn’t a gender problem, it’s not a race problem and it’s not a class problem. It’s a society problem, it’s a business problem and it’s a generational problem. It’s a problem whether it’s that workplace is predominantly male or predominantly female. I want us to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and start believing in our own power. Women are 50% of the population, add in the other groups who face barriers and the men who genuinely get it and we should be a force to be reckoned with. If each one of us has a conversation that changes something small every day that builds into something bigger. If each one of us shows that we can respect someone who isn’t like us or who doesn’t agree with us that puts more respect into the world-and god knows it feels like we need that right now doesn’t it?

So instead of going into battle, let’s be part of a movement to accelerate action.

If you'd like to know how to start a movement why not watch Derek Sivers TED Talk on How to start a movement