Women Leaders in sustainability working to #BreakTheBias

The pandemic has underlined two pre-existing plagues: unsustainable business and social inequality. During the current recession, women’s jobs are 1.8 times more likely to be cut than those held by men. That means that the gender pay gap, which measures the average difference between hourly wages for men and women, is about to get even bigger.

The latest gender pay gap median figure in the UK is 11.5%. Marked out on a calender, last year 20th November was the last day the average British woman was paid for her work. That means all work done for the rest of the year was free. Known as Equal Pay Day, this measure highlights how far we have to go to close the gender pay gap, which is even worse for mothers, minorities and older women.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. Equal Pay Day also provides an opportunity to come together as a community and share our knowledge, compassion and advice. Below, we tell the stories of twelve women, all running environmental or social impact businesses part of The Do-Gooders community, all striving for a more sustainable, more equal world. This is our witness statement for what the British government can do to guide businesses and what businesses can do to support women.

Marie Cudennec, Goldfinger Factory

“I remember a moment when I was about eight years old, looking over the harbour in Hong Kong and seeing a fridge floating in the ocean. It was such a harrowing moment,” says Marie Cudennec, co-founder of furniture design and education platform Goldfinger. “It always stayed with me: humans are the problem but we could also be the solution.”

Marie co-founded Goldfinger in 2013 to turn the tide on throwaway culture by rescuing sustainable materials and turning them into high-quality furniture and homewares. The London-based team also offers local residents facing financial hardship training and apprenticeships in sustainable woodworking. “We have a perfect split: four women and four men on the team, plus volunteers,” she says. “Coming from the luxury beauty industry where it was 90% women, 10% men, who are always the most senior, I was aware of not making it too female-led,” she says. “A diverse workforce is absolutely the way to go.”

The moment that Marie knew she had to go from employee to entrepreneur came after a performance review: “The feedback around my work was great but they had one issue with me, which was that I didn’t wear enough make-up,” she says. “It makes me laugh when I think about it now - no one would say that to a man.”

In everything Marie does, she always tries to come back to question zero, a concept introduced to her when she was invited to attend a summer course at Harvard Business School. “We can get so bogged down in the activities, the programmes, the numbers. Question zero is about asking yourself: What are you trying to achieve?” For Marie, the answer is sustainability, equality and community.

Natalie Campbell, Belu Water

“Everything I do is about championing women in leadership roles”, says Natalie Campbell, CEO of environment-first drinks business, Belu. Founded in 2002, Belu provides sustainably sourced and bottled British water and filtration systems to the hospitality industry. It gives 100% of its profits to the charity WaterAid and hires people based on attitude and their values.

After running a retail clothing franchise during her university degree, Natalie worked on Government entrepreneurship policies. She started her social innovation consultancy A Very Good Company in 2010 and went on to work with the charitable foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2018. She joined Belu as CEO earlier this year.

“I went through my career thinking any barriers were there to be broken down,” she says. “I was always paid the same as my male colleagues - I’d ask them and if I found out they were paid more, I would say to my boss, ‘We’re doing the same job so my salary should be the same as his, or more.’” Even though paying British men and women different salaries for the same job has been illegal for 50 years, it still happens. In 2018, BBC reporter Carrie Gracie discovered that she was being paid 50% less than male colleagues. Last year, she donated her backdated pay to The Equal Pay Advice Service and The Fawcett Society to help fund legal costs for women going to court over unequal pay.

“As individuals, we need to start talking about money,” says Natalie. “Do not compromise on what you should be getting paid. Stop thinking about time and start thinking about the value you’re bringing to a business - that is the salary you should have,” she says. “As businesses, we need to remove the smoke and mirrors around money. If it was all open, no one wouldn’t be able to get away with unequal pay. The BBC is a good example of that.”

Godie van de Paal, Kingdom of Wow!

Not many people start a business that provides free lunches, daycare, insurance, fair wages and a safe working environment for Khmer women in Cambodia. But that’s what Godie van de Paal did when she founded ethical slipper business Kingdom of Wow! in 2017.

“I moved to Cambodia for my husband’s job and started the business to put my knowledge of responsible manufacturing to the test,” she says. Godie previously lived and worked in Shanghai as the Netherland’s Vice Consul for Economic and Commercial Affairs.

“Very often conversations about business are focused on monetary aspects, but that’s not everything,” she says. “We offer daycare, it costs money, and if you look at the other side of the balance sheet, there’s nothing. We offer free lunches, it costs money, and on the other side there’s nothing. You don’t see it on your balance sheet but you do see it in the fact that you don’t have retention issues or sick leave. It takes me three months to train someone and then another three months until they’re up to the same level as other workers. If someone leaves, it sets me back six months and that costs money.”

Godie is acutely aware of how to look after her workers. “The key when you have children is flexibility. I can do a whole load of work but not necessarily between 9am and 5pm,” she says. “We are very flexible and offer daycare, but not permanently. I’m not going to facilitate these existing structures where the woman has to do everything. She can’t be the only one earning an income and also take sole responsibility for daycare. Most of the dads are unemployed at the moment - 90% of the economy in Siem Reap is based on tourism - so we’re trying to involve the husbands.”

Affordable daycare is something she would love to see governments address. “For lots of women, the decision is: Do I keep working? Or will I be working to pay for daycare? Governments have a responsibility to look at that, not just because they need to help advance equality between men and women, but because it makes more economic sense for women to stay in the workforce if they want to.”

Kate Tilbury, Rowdy Kind

Kate Tilbury was inspired to start her business by her son. “He was sitting in the bath and asked, ‘Mum, why are you using baby product on me?’ He was seven at the time. And I went, ‘Good question, why am I using baby product? Ok next time we go to the supermarket I’ll let you choose something suitable.’ But when we got there, it was really hard to find something that wasn’t in a plastic bottle and didn’t gender stereotype the kids with ‘blue is for boys, pink is for girls.’”

From her background in the consumer goods industry, Kate knew how unlikely it was that a big brand would develop the product she and her son needed. “When a company really gets behind sustainability, they can make some big changes in a short amount of time,” she says. “The difficulty is that for the really big changes, legacy systems make it really hard. A business built around filling plastic bottles with liquid is not going to be able to change at the speed we need.”

Kate decided to solve her own problem. in 2020, she launched Rowdy Kind, a business selling plastic free shampoo and body bars for kids. At the moment, it’s just her and her sister-in-law Anne Marie Wright running the business. But as it grows, she plans to put policies in place to support employees who are parents and to always lead by example.  “We already have ‘rule number 1’” she says, “families always come first.”

“There’s policy and then there’s leadership. You have to do both of those, otherwise there’s no change,” she says. “It’s the difference between having a policy where men can take six month leave but no one on the leadership ever taking it versus people on the leadership team taking it and therefore indicating all the way down that it’s an acceptable behaviour.”

Kate is also an advocate of referring to ‘parental leave’ not ‘maternity’ or ‘paternity’ leave and changing the culture around men requesting part-time work. “If men felt they could apply for part-time work and that request was valued, that would free women up and level the whole playing field.”

Charlotte Morley, thelittleloop

“I always wanted to be the woman to beat the odds and prove them wrong. But the reality is the imbalance in the system means that inequality will affect every woman sooner or later. I was treated pretty awfully on maternity leave. But that gave me the final nudge I needed to start my business,” says Charlotte Morley, founder of online rental marketplace thelittleloop.

Founded in 2019, thelittleloop’s mission is clear: save money, save time, save the planet. Its subscription enables parents to rent clothes for their kids and swap them for another size or style when they’re too small or the seasons change.

Before starting her business, Charlotte spent ten years working for MI5 before moving on to work in tech. Reflecting on her time in both the public and private sector, the change she’d most like to see is around flexible working and presenteeism. “My one hope from the pandemic is that we start measuring people differently. Measuring hours worked disproportionately disadvantages women. And it’s a terrible proxy for productivity. But it’s easy to do so we default to it. Now, because people are working from home and you can’t see the hours that they’re sitting at their desk, you have to measure by outcomes - what they actually achieve.”

This mindset of measuring outcomes over hours is how she runs her own company. “I want to employ people flexibly, particularly parents if I can,” she says. “There are so many talented people out there who are not working or working in jobs that are not up to what they can do because they can’t find something that’s flexible enough to do around their family lives. We have a great opportunity now. We don’t need to go back to a world where we all work in the office 9am to 5pm, five days a week - it’s not necessary and it’s not efficient.”

Elinor Pitt, Stitched

Stitched brings together Elinor Pitt’s two passions: technology and interior design. Previously, customers buying curtains or blinds would have to cross their fingers that the colours, fabric and size would work for their space. With Stitched, 3D and Augmented Reality technology enables customers to build and visualise their product before it’s made. More than 50% of fabrics are made in the UK and all of them are eco-friendly, made from natural and recycled fibres.

“One of the reasons I left technology fairly early on in my career was the lack of female role models,” says Elinor, who co-founded Stitched in 2017. “There was no clear idea of what my path might look like.”

In the UK, just 16% of technology professionals are women. Beyond encouraging girls and women to pursue careers in technology, Elinor would also like lecturers and mentors broaden the scope of their career advice. “You can marry the technical and the creative,” she says. Elinor did her first degree in electronic engineering and her second in interior design. The Stitched board is 75% women which matches their customer base.

Stitched is currently in the process of becoming a B Corporation, a certificate for businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. “To be a successful business, we need to think about the whole pie - our employees, our investors, the product, our customers. We want to be a good business across the board.”

Susan Allen & Tara Chandra,
Here We Flo

“We wanted to create a company that felt like something your best friend would suggest to you,” says Susan Allen Augustin, co-founder of organic period product brand Flo. All packaging is biodegradable or recyclable and 5% of profits go to girls and women in need. Flo also donates products each month to fight period poverty.

“We had the idea seven years ago chatting in the bathroom between classes during our Masters , but we only started the company three years ago,” says co-founder Tara Chandra. The extensive research and focus groups they did as part of their degrees paid off; Flo has quickly become an international company, sold in supermarkets and pharmacies in the UK, France, Netherlands, South Africa and parts of the United States.

The team is currently made up of three full-time employees, one part-time employee and several contractors. As they grow, the founders are determined to keep doing the right thing, both on recruitment and retention. “One thing I’m proud to be a part of is thinking really consciously about diversity,” says Tara. “We’re constantly asking ourselves: How does our applicant pool look? Do we need to reach out more? You sometimes need to work harder to get a more equitable, diverse applicant pool. You can’t rely on people putting themselves forward and then tell yourself that you’ve hired ‘the best person for the job,’ especially when we know certain demographics don’t apply, even when they’re qualified,” she says. “I really believe that representation matters.”

When Susan isn’t branding and marketing Flo, she works as Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for Open Society Foundations. One of her key focuses is bringing more women into leadership roles in the non-profit sector. “As a general trend, at senior management level, external knowledge is valued more than internal knowledge within the company,” she says. “When looking at external pipelines at that level, it’s very male, very white, often. So you’re then picking from a completely different pool, even if the rest of your organisation is diverse. It calls for introspection about your own culture.”

For both small and large companies, expanding your applicant pool and developing your pipeline internally is critical. “Really living your values is the way to set that tone,” says Susan. “You can write really glossy Diversity & Inclusion statements but it’s really the way you act as founders that people take away.”

Maame Opoku, MamaSia

“I wasn’t getting the opportunities I thought I deserved in my career, so I did something myself,” says Maame Opoku, co-founder of natural beauty brand MamaSia. “Although we bear the scars of our experiences, those are what shape you.”

Established in 2012, MamaSia brings Ghanian ingredients and products, such as shea butter, to Britain. “We use ancient techniques with a modern approach,” she says. Maame learned about Ghanian customs and culture when she went to live in her ancestral village aged 12. “I asked lots of questions: Why are you using this cream, why are you drinking this tea? Some family members found it annoying but the elders found it inspiring. I started the business to help the community back home but also to express the skills and knowledge I’d acquired in my childhood.”

Skills and knowledge are what she focuses on when bringing people into her business, made up of more than forty Ghanian women. “I feel that we should not be intimidated by one gender or the other shining at the gift they want to express,” she says. “Companies need to keep it simple and take people based on their skills and knowledge. If we were really authentic in that approach, we wouldn’t need to have these conversations anymore.”

Sophie Slater, Birdsong

“We might be tiny but the big mission is to change the blueprint,” says Sophie Slater, who launched sustainable and ethical fashion brand Birdsong in 2014. Today, she remains as determined as ever to change the way women in retail are valued.

It’s estimated that 60 million women worldwide, aged 18-35, make less than a minimum wage from their work in the garment industry. As a London Living Wage Employer, Birdsong is set apart. Unlike the minimum wage, the living wage changes according to location, depending on the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. “With retail, you’re often made to feel replaceable. People are scared of losing their jobs if they stick up for themselves,” she says. “Retail workers deserve to be paid properly and need decent union representation.”

From refugees to adults with learning disabilities, Birdsong employs people from all walks of life to make, embroider, package and market its products. Feminism pulses through every decision she and her business partner make, from materials to models.

“I’d always worked with clothes but I never thought I’d start a business,” says Sophie. “I’d worked in retail for five years and I briefly had a modelling contract in London, which for someone from a seaside town up North was very exciting. But as a teenager, I was over-sexualised by the modelling and retail industry. When I was 15 being photographed, male photographers constantly commented on my body,” she says. “It’s provided massive motivation for making Birdsong shoots as wholesome and encouraging as possible. We try to make everyone feel like a person, not a piece of meat.”

Genia Mineeva, BEEN London

“I always had two sides of me - technology, media and impact - and a love for beautiful, slow craftsmanship,” says Genia Mineeva, founder of BEEN London. Working with an East London bagmaker, she creates and sells purses, laptop cases and handbags made from recycled leather, repurposed and processed from off-cuts and trimmings. Zips are made from recycled plastic bottles. Other materials include repurposed cotton, felt and extracted pineapple leaf fibres.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Genia worked as a BBC political journalist and Communications Director for the petition platform change.org. The spark for starting Been was a documentary about waste: “I started researching in both directions: What happens to things when we’re done with them? And where do things come from?” From there, she enrolled on a postgraduate course in Sustainable Value Chains at the University of Cambridge. And later, a course at the London College of Fashion.

“I wanted a product that would start conversations between people,” she says. “I wanted to turn something that people considered waste into something so beautiful, so practical, that it would seamlessly go into people’s lives.” BEEN is that conversation, that product, funded through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. “It took one day to raise the capital to start it. And we were profitable within a year.”

Genia chose to crowdfund her business rather than raise money through traditional investors. “Raising money as a female founder, I felt that I wasn’t in the strongest position - I don’t know where I got this impression from as I never had a ‘no.’ Maybe I felt like that because I was 39, product-based and female,” she says. “It was a similar feeling to when you have a child and you come back to the office and you pretend like you don’t have a family. I always felt like I had to look extra-professional and look impeccable because I had a baby at home. I had to perform even better than everyone else because I was a mother.”

In the end, her customers became her investors, facilitated by the technology platforms Kickstarter and SEEDRS. “Our investors are majority women,” she says. “I just love women. Kick-ass women is what I want in my life.” BEEN is a Living Wage Employer run by an all-female team, representative of the ripple effect of investing in female founders: believe in one woman, support many more.

Alixzondra Samuda, Mudd Beauty

When Alixzondra Samuda’s mother was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, she began to question the relationship between her own health and what she consumed. “I started to look at the ingredients in the products I already owned. And I was blown away by how toxic some of them could be. As someone who wears make-up every single day, I really have to think about what I’m putting on my skin. I started to shop for brands that used better ingredients but what I noticed was that the brands didn’t cater for my skin tone. That was when Mudd was born.”

Mudd Beauty lipsticks are organic, cruelty-free and vegan, designed to cater for all skin tones. Alixzondra photographs her products on black models, something she thinks contributed to her selling out on launch day in 2017. Three years on, she employs two women and arranges internships for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Alixzondra aims to inspire more women, especially mothers, to become entrepreneurs. Her Masters centred on women being able to smash through glass ceilings while also having a family. Part of that involves making entrepreneurship courses and accelerator programmes more parent-friendly. “When I graduated, I went on a business course that provided free office space and mentoring. But I noticed that they didn’t cater for parents. Any workshops they offered were after 5pm - what about women who have children? I was pulled up for not attending certain sessions because I couldn’t arrange childcare,” she says.

“We need to give women a voice. That in turn leads to opportunities and it builds from there. No matter who says it’s a man’s world, women make the world go round.”

To make your voice heard, please consider signing the petitions to stop pay discrimination in the UK and to prevent an all-male British team being sent to the UN climate summit in November 2021.

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