It’s been an incredibly busy year at Your Energy Your Way, which perhaps explains why this blog has been a little quiet. However, we’ve some exciting news to share and I wanted to write a post. A post inspired by toilets.
The photo here shows the queue for the ladies’ toilets at the Tate Modern this weekend. Nothing remarkable, just an everyday experience for millions of women around the world – we queue for the toilet far more than men do. In a weird way, it’s a key to the theme of this post; our upcoming exciting news; and this years’ theme for International Women’s Day.
The aim of the IWD 2023 #EmbraceEquity campaign theme is to get the world talking about why equal opportunities aren’t enough. At the simple level of our most basic needs, equal opportunities are having the same space for toilets at the Tate Modern for women as there are for men. Equity would be having more space for the women.
We’ve collectively decided that it is enough to offer an equal space for toilets in a building for both genders. We’ve decided to offer an equality of opportunity to go to the loo. To #embracequity would be to allow a bigger building footprint for the ladies than for the gents, acknowledging that each female toilet takes up a larger physical space than a male one.
This is why at Your Energy Your Way we’re setting up our own training course to get into renewables. We’re tired of people telling us that there is equality of opportunity for a diverse group of people to get into the industry; that the reason why the majority of tradespeople are white men is because other people aren’t interested.
We think there are some actual barriers that stop women getting these satisfying, well paid jobs. So we’re setting out to remove these for a pilot training course to see if we can attract a more diverse cohort into our firm. We think these barriers are as follows:
- Lack of positive role models in the industry to make people think they can belong in this space.
- Lack of opportunities to retrain into this industry post-16. We have found that most women enter this industry at a slightly later age.
- Lack of opportunities to get on the job work experience if you don’t fit the conventional mould of white male.
Our training course will address all these things and you can be part of it. We are looking for investors right now to help make it a reality. You can find out more here