International Women’s Day 2021

05.03.2021

2021 Update This International Women’s Day we’d like to reflect on the last five and a half years of our Women in Mountain Training initiative.

Women in Mountain Training was created in October 2015 out of a desire for our leaders, instructors and coaches to better represent the people who participate in walking and climbing. In 2015 we recognised that our data showed a disparity in the percentage of people gaining our qualifications who were women (25.5% of passes in 2015, 18.4% of all passes since 1964) compared to the percentage of participants who were women (36% in 2015).
To better understand the reasons behind this gap we canvassed attendees of the 2015 Women’s Climbing Symposium and have continued to track the data whilst taking a number of actions. These have included:

Creating our Women in Mountain Training Facebook group, currently home to 2.6k members, predominantly women – to provide a supportive space for women who are using or pursuing our qualifications.
Emailing all climbing scheme candidates who are women asking for their feedback as part of our Climbing Schemes Review in 2015 and studying women’s responses to the main survey – to ensure the experiences of women were specifically considered as part of the research.
Setting up a mentoring scheme for women working towards Mountaineering and Climbing Instructor assessment – to provide more highly qualified role models and a more diverse pool of people who could join our delivery workforce.
Adding information about managing menstruation in the hills to the sanitation section of our Hill Walking book.
Researching candidates’ experiences of the Mountain Leader qualification, including identifying differences in the pathway experienced by male and female candidates.

In 2020, despite the challenges faced by individuals and organisations across the sector, our data showed the percentage of people passing who are women had increased to 33.9%, while the ‘all time’ percentage had increased to 20.4%. This is great progress and we believe there’s still more we can do.

What next?

We’ve created a Gender Equality Strategy 2021-2025 which is currently in draft format and will be presented at Mountain Training UK and Ireland’s Council Meeting at the end of March. We are also working to address other areas of diversity and inclusion within our schemes.

The Gender Equality Strategy will address four areas: skills and knowledge, leadership, value and visibility, connections and engagement.

We’re excited to begin the implementation of this strategy by gathering insight into baseline participation figures in partnership with seven other organisations (ABC, ABCTT, BMC, Camping & Caravanning Club, Outdoor Industries Association, Plas y Brenin, Ramblers). The research is being carried out by Leeds Beckett University and more details will be available later this week.

Here is a taster of the type of work we plan to do over the next five years:

We will work with partners and key stakeholders such as Women’s Trad Fest, Women’s Climbing Symposium and the mountaineering councils to create more opportunities for women to participate in walking and climbing activities.
We will work with partners such as Black Dog Outdoors and the mountaineering councils to create opportunities to deliver skills training that enable women to be independent walkers and climbers.
We will work with the four professional associations to support the development of current and future women leaders in the adventure activities sector.

DRAFT Gender Equality Strategy

How to support International Women’s Day

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is #ChooseToChallenge. Here are four things you can choose to do to challenge the status quo:

Celebrate women's achievements.
Maintain a gender equal mindset.
Challenge gender stereotypes and bias.
Take action to help forge a gender equal world.

For more information about this year’s theme, the International Women’s Day website has lots of useful resources.

Facts and figures Our ‘direct entry’ qualifications (those that don’t have any other qualifications as a prerequisite) are more gender diverse than the higher level qualifications, with Lowland Leader and Climbing Wall Instructor seeing the highest number of women passing as well as the highest percentage of people passing who are women. The absolute numbers of women passing the higher qualifications are relatively low which means the percentages can vary greatly from year to year.

Number of women passing direct entry qualifications

Number of women passing direct entry qualifications

Number of women passing higher level qualifications

It is encouraging to note that in 2020 we didn’t see a huge shift in the percentages of people passing who are women, in fact looking at the entry level qualifications, all of them except Hill and Moorland Leader saw an increase in the percentage compared to 2019. The figures for people completing training however, indicate a slight decrease in the percentages for women in all direct entry qualifications except Lowland Leader, suggesting that the impact of the pandemic may have been felt more greatly by women in the early stages of their pathway to qualification. The gender diversity of people registering in 2020 wasn’t significantly different to previous years.

Percentage passing who are women direct entry

Percentage passing who are women direct entry

Percentage passing who are women higher qualifications

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