What will you be doing to celebrate International Women’s Day?  

I always wonder why we only have one day for women. I think everyday should be women’s day – maybe that is why I won’t be doing anything different to what I normally do, getting on with my job whilst juggling family and life around it. I imagine that is what most women will be doing on Woman’s Day. What if all women just stopped doing what they do – the things that everybody takes for granted – would the world cope?

How are you accelerating action? 

Accelerating action, despite the image of fast-moving pace, actually takes time as you build on successes and lessons learnt. Recognising the impact of the actions you take is what can often be missed and as a consequence acceleration can flat-line. Therefore ensuring we regularly take stock, use the lessons learnt, continually improve our workplace support and facilitating participation of women from the communities we serve will support continual and steady acceleration. 

Highlighting the benefits for women and their contribution to the delivery of our work is critical in mainstreaming appreciation of women working in environmental careers.

I think Trees for Cities has significantly accelerated women in our leadership and organisational structure over recent years, but we know it isn’t time to sit back. I am conscious that we have to support all our female staff in the workplace, at all levels so they are cared for and listened to whilst performing their job. I hope we are in a strong position to allow women to use their cultural and social experiences to inform the decisions we make both inside Trees for Cities but also in the projects we deliver.

How does being a woman give you a unique perspective to bring to your work?

A lot of my career has been working in male-dominated environments with engineers, architects and construction site personnel. It was often intimidating but mostly it was fine. I have learnt to be tolerant of different perspectives and communication approaches. In fact, a female voice can sometimes be a useful change in tone if you have something to say as a woman that can make people listen.

As a professional focusing on planning and designing urban green space, I know that women are probably the most important users to cater for in terms of creating comfortable, safe, child friendly, culturally inviting spaces for women to inhabit and navigate. They are often carrying things, pushing children or taking care of other people in these places. So, a woman designing and planning spaces for women can pick up on nuances that men perhaps may not notice and potential dangers they are not even aware of.

Some people argue we have equality in the UK – why might this be uninformed? 

We are probably better in some areas today than we were when I first entered the workplace over 30 years ago. But today there are other dangers that are better articulated around misogyny and gender division that I wasn’t even aware of back in the day. We are better at pointing out misinformed behaviour or unintentional comments but that is not enough. 

I don’t think sufficient progress has been made yet on institutional misogyny or professional misogyny. I am lucky as a landscape architect that it has for a long time been very gender balanced. However, this is less so in the professions of engineering and architecture although these are improving.
 
The worst thing that I notice is how numbers of older women in these professions drop off after the age of thirty or forty. Where do they all go? And why are there no clear routes back into these professions after childcare and family commitments reduce? The main landscape architecture companies are mostly led by men with a team of youthful female staff.

Have you ever faced any challenges as a woman in the urban forestry sector?

I have found the urban forestry sector to be a welcoming and inclusive place to work with people from all backgrounds who are appreciative of the work we do at Trees for Cities. It feels like the doors are opening wider for those who would not normally consider working in the sector and hopefully active encouragement for female applicants will reduce the challenges others might have had previously.  

From your perspective, does more work need to be done to bring more women into the forestry sector?

We need to ensure there are good pathways and flexible working spaces for talented older and experienced women in our professional and organisational structures so women can be valued and appreciated for their contributions. A healthy workplace needs good balances of ages, genders, cultures, ethnicity and skills. Our urban forestry sector needs to better represent the people it is delivering for and with. And we need to ensure experienced women have opportunities to lead from the top rather than under the patriarchal umbrella. It is very easy to become invisible as a female especially if you are older. Equality can only come if we make space for women keeping them visible and heard in our sector! 

Tell us about your drive for tree equity

Tree equity targets places that are not only low in tree canopy cover but those that suffer from inequality across multiple levels.Some places are hugely less equal than others and as I mentioned before this can be worse for women as key users.

Who inspires you the most?

I really love people achieving remarkable things against the odds. I recently saw a documentary about Lhakpa Sherpa. She is a remarkable Nepalese woman from the famous mountaineering clan of Sherpas with a fire and love of nature driving her forward to achieve the most extreme achievement of summiting Mount Everest ten times (once when she was pregnant). She continually breaks her own record for the number of Everest summits by a female climber. 

After her successes she would return to her life and an abusive relationship in the US where she was unsung and unknown. The documentary describes her domestic struggles and how she overcame them. It contrasts her double life of adventure to that at home with her children who are only now realising and appreciating their mother through the eyes of the world (check out her documentary). She said: