The Future of Green Jobs Is Female - and Rising
“There’s a huge opportunity out there - and we can’t afford to sleep-walk into repeating the same old imbalances.”
- Jane Thomas [Founder, Women in Rising Green Careers]
When I logged on for the call, Jane was sitting in her kitchen. Her daughter had commandeered the office for homework. It was a scene most working parents will recognise - and a fitting backdrop for a conversation about the next generation of green jobs and why women’s participation will determine whether the UK actually hits its retrofit and net-zero targets.
Jane heads Women in Rising Green Careers (WRGC), a young CIC that grew out of the Women in Retrofit network. What began as a handful of events about attracting women into retrofit training and jobs has widened into a sector-wide mission: to remove the barriers that keep women out of energy-efficiency, clean-tech and net-zero careers, and to make the opportunity visible and accessible to everyone, from school-leavers to mid-career changers.
In a sector that still too often talks to itself, Jane’s voice is disruptive in the best sense: data-driven, un-scripted, and impatient for change.
Women in Rising Green Careers Website
A Workforce Problem We Can’t Ignore
The numbers are stark.
- UK retrofit programmes alone face a skills shortfall of ~235,000 workers over the next decade.
- A quarter of construction workers are over 50, and thousands leave the workforce every year without replacement.
- Estimates for green-economy jobs across home-energy, heat electrification and clean transport range anywhere from 135,000 to 725,000 roles in the next phase of the Warm Homes Plan, Clean Energy Mission and EV infrastructure roll-out.
Jane’s ambition is simple arithmetic: half of those jobs should be filled by women.
“We’re not saying every trade needs to be 50 % female - but across the full spread of roles there is no reason why we shouldn’t have parity,”
she told me.
“This is a new industry. We have a chance to do it better - not drag the old imbalances with us.”
Those imbalances are familiar: the gender pay gap, which appears to be worse in the green sector than the wider labour market; and a concentration of women in the lower-paid operational and administrative roles rather than the technical and leadership posts that carry higher salaries and influence.
From Lived Experience to a Movement
Jane’s motivation is personal as much as strategic. She describes a two decade career in energy efficiency where, as she rose through senior posts, the rooms became more male dominated and the pay disparities more glaring.
“I’ve sat earning less than my own male direct-reports. I’ve had ‘flexible-working’ agreements that looked good on paper but were ignored in practice - 9 a.m. meetings scheduled on my agreed school-run days.
You start to realise these aren’t isolated stories - they’re structural barriers.”
She also remembers ordering her first PPE kit for power-station site visits:
“I asked for size-3 safety boots. The reply came back: ‘Is this a joke?’
They had literally never ordered a pair that small.”
Small anecdotes, perhaps - but they point to a culture still designed around a default six-foot male body and a linear career path uninterrupted by caregiving.
Research First, Policy Second
Rather than launch another advocacy campaign heavy on slogans, WRGC is focusing on building the evidence base.
- A nation-wide survey gathering data on barriers to entry, retention and progression for women in green jobs.
- A series of focus-groups with employers, training providers, colleges, local authorities, housing associations, food-poverty charities and community groups.
- Plans to partner with academic institutions to analyse the data rigorously and shape policy-ready recommendations.
“There’s plenty of top-down policy and a lot of piecemeal initiatives,”
Jane argues.
“What’s missing is a clear picture of what’s actually happening on the ground - what structures help women thrive, and what keeps them out.”
Story-First Recruitment: The Female Green-Careers Library
Alongside the research, WRGC is building what Jane calls “the definitive female green-careers library.”
Rather than abstract job-profiles, it will present real women’s stories, their routes into the sector, the work they do day-to-day, the pay, the ups and downs.
“Most people still don’t know what a ‘green job’ is, let alone what a retrofit assessor or a fabric-first coordinator actually does. If you can’t picture yourself in the role, you won’t aspire to it. So let’s show you someone like you, doing it.”
It’s a principle we understand at Refurb & Retrofit: case-studies build trust.
They also recruit talent.
Breaking the Echo-Chamber
Jane is candid about the communication gap.
“LinkedIn is useful, but it’s an echo-chamber. The people we most need to reach - school-leavers, parents, career-changers in other industries - are not on there reading jargon-heavy net-zero posts. We have to talk to them differently.”
At recent events, WRGC has leaned into a more playful, approachable tone:
‘Retrofit Barbie’ - a life-size pink-framed selfie-stand with the caption “There is no Retrofit Barbie. Anyone can be her.” Logo-iced cookies at networking breaks.
Panels that sound like conversations rather than PowerPoint decks.
“It’s tongue-in-cheek but it makes the point: this industry is open to you. And if we want real inclusion we need to stop talking in a way that only insiders understand.”
Inclusion Is Not a Fringe Issue
The construction and engineering worlds still carry what Jane calls the “false-flag” problem: organisations happy to showcase a single ‘acceptable’ female face while leaving the underlying culture unchanged.
“Real inclusion means making room for disruptive voices. If the only women on stage are there to rubber-stamp the status quo, you haven’t changed anything.”
Persistence, Jane argues, is the only route:
“Every advance - women’s rights, workplace safety, even retrofit itself - was once seen as fringe. It moved to the mainstream because people refused to be sidelined.”
The Economic and Political Prize
Beyond the fairness argument lies a harder-headed one: talent and productivity.
The UK will not hit its retrofit, heat-pump and clean-energy deployment targets without tapping the full labour pool. And the green transition could be a good-news economic story at a time when household bills and job insecurity dominate voters’ minds.
“If the jobs and the growth are real, why wouldn’t you make sure everyone knows about them? Otherwise the space is left open for misinformation - and we’ve seen how that plays out politically.”
Her point lands.
Having reported from council estates, bus-depot canteens and construction sites as well as Westminster receptions, I’ve seen how fast resentment can be weaponised when people feel talked-at rather than invited in.
WinR CIC
Jane Making Her Mark at the EEA Conference
Flexible Work Is Productive Work
One of the strongest notes in Jane’s story is how work is organised.
“The last few months I’ve been able to focus fully on WRGC. I set my own schedule. I can do the school-run, pick up a late call after bedtime, fit life around work. It hasn’t made me less productive - if anything, more so.
And the same for Sarah, who supports me. We trust each other to deliver.”
That reality, she argues, is still far from normal in many SMEs delivering retrofit projects, let alone in the big tier-one contractors.
Yet it is precisely the kind of family-friendly flexibility that would open the sector to a broader pool of talent - men as well as women.
Culture Change Starts With the Everyday
Some barriers are structural; others are surprisingly mundane. PPE that fits.
Meetings scheduled around fixed-site school-hours. Networking formats that don’t assume everyone can linger in a hotel bar at 10 p.m. Recruitment campaigns that feature relatable faces and clear pay-bands, not acronyms.
These are not ‘soft’ issues. They shape who even applies for the jobs we urgently need filled.
A Call for Better Data - and Real Stories
WRGC is currently seeking:
- Employers and training providers willing to share anonymised data on pay-bands, hiring and retention.
- Women in any stage of a green-sector career - from apprentices to directors - who are willing to tell their stories for the careers library.
- Partners in academia, local government and community organisations to host focus-groups and extend outreach beyond the usual policy circles.
(To take part, visit https://www.winrcic.co.uk/)
Why This Matters to Retrofit
Retrofit is often portrayed as a technical challenge - heat-loss calculations, PAS 2035 pathways, U-values. But as any installer, coordinator or housing officer knows, it is fundamentally a people business.
We need thousands more assessors, coordinators, designers, customer-facing advisors, data-managers and programme leads as well as on-site trades. We need them fast. And we need them to stick with the sector.
That means making the jobs visible, attractive and viable for the whole working-age population.
Editorial Note
I’ve been covering the UK’s retrofit transition for 2 years. I’ve seen promising programmes stall for lack of skills and for lack of trust. I’ve also seen the difference a single compelling case-study can make - whether it’s a heat-pump engineer explaining their craft on camera, or a carpenter whose retrofit sash-window story went viral and filled his order-book for two years.
Jane’s project sits at that same hinge-point: show the opportunity, back it with data, humanise it with stories. Do that well and the sector gains not just workers but advocates - and the politics around net-zero starts to look a lot less abstract.
The Road Ahead
Change will not come overnight. Jane is realistic about that.
But she is also, in her own word, persistent.
“Every time someone tells me ‘that’s just how the industry is’, I hear it as an invitation to prove them wrong.”
If the green transition is to be more than a spreadsheet of targets, it will depend on that kind of persistence - backed by evidence, amplified by media, and grounded in the day-to-day realities of families, communities and workplaces.
At Refurb & Retrofit we’ll be following WRGC’s research and careers-library rollout over the coming year. And we’ll keep doing what we do best: telling the stories that turn statistics into people, barriers into opportunities, and policies into practical steps.