Elmhurst Celebrates International Women’s Day

Fiona Wilson, Business Development Manager

International Women’s Day fell on 8th March this year, which provided a good opportunity to reflect on what Elmhurst is doing to help support women. This year’s theme is about breaking the bias, which really does play on what we are doing at Elmhurst.

Bias exists throughout the world, and whilst we all believe we don’t hold these biases - we do. This is easy to see when we consider that just under 14% of Energy Assessors are women. So at Elmhurst we have been looking for ways to address this imbalance and to help our existing members.

For example, following feedback from the first Women’s Forum we held in mid-2021, we have put together information on lone working, personal safety, with links to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust’s website for app suggestions. We have also been adding more job opportunities to our main website to help members connect with companies and projects.

In the first forum, participants raised a need for a dedicated area for women to discuss the areas that concern them, ask for advice and connect with one another. This has led to the development of our Facebook Page “Elmhurst Energy – Women working in energy efficiency” which has proven to be very popular – with over 160 members! If you are a woman working in the industry, we would love to have you join our Facebook page and join the conversations.

We have since run another Women’s Forum, and we are intending to hold these regularly throughout the year to help women in the industry connect, share experiences and help us understand what more we can be doing.

From this forum we have had a few more ideas that we are looking to develop further, including looking at ways that assessors can network more locally, connect with members on other strands and potentially some mentoring opportunities to help build confidence.

International Women’s Day is a good day to look at what we are doing, but, it’s not the only day that we do so.

Unfortunately there is still a way to go to improve the overall statistics, so please let us know any ideas you have to help encourage more women into this industry, or to support those that are here now.