Eleanor’s response to IWD 2023

As a female founder and director of a landscape practice, I am definitely in the minority. As a practice we want our team to be gender balanced at all levels, a large part of which is a commitment to support ALL team members to have flexibility so that they and their partners can share life duties like school pick-up/ drop-offs for their children etc.

As I discuss in the Landscape Institute + Open City podcast (https://lnkd.in/eE6nrpXB) with Paul Lincoln, Jade Goto, and Sophie Thompson, it is depressing that we are still talking about the same issues that have been talked about for decades; how public places have historically been designed to a male bias; how there is a lack of thoughtfulness in designing spaces in which women feel safe; and how girls feel alienated from parks by their early teens…

Another thing that comes up year after year in salary surveys is that women are paid less than their male colleagues for the same role. Our own sector included as discussed in the Review of the landscape’s workforce, https://lnkd.in/gf6W8bSd

To me, this seems a fair, reasonably straightforward change that every business could implement.

So, let’s not spend any more time celebrating ‘improvements’ or justifying why women are being paid less than men for the same roles…

Happy International Women’s Day 2023.