“I can’t remember the last time I saw a waste collector who was a woman”, Resource Futures CEO Jane Stephenson tells me, and in truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one. We’re reflecting on what’s changed since April 2000, when Resource’s very first cover feature detailed how ‘the not-for-profit sector [was] challenging the “bin man” stereotypes with a growing contingent of smart and talented women’ at the coalface of waste collection. That article predicted ‘the male monopoly is on its way out’ and that ‘bin women’ would become increasingly common.

Twelve years on, and the number of female waste collectors has, if anything, gone down. “I think that was a bit of a blip when there were a lot of community recycling projects around [operating collection rounds]”, Stephenson suggests, “and of course, there aren’t so many now.” (And those that have survived in the field tend to operate much more like private-sector companies; the UK’s largest third-sector provider of kerbside services, Bryson Recycling in Northern Ireland, sources staff for collection rounds and its MRF through agencies, and these agencies have never provided any women to fill the posts.)

Certainly, the statistics depict the waste industry as a whole (including waste collectors, local authorities, reprocessors, consultants and so on) as overwhelmingly male and white, and a bit old. BIS figures from 2010 show that the sector is 82 per cent male, and that 93-96 per cent of workers are white in a sector that is ‘considerably older’ than the UK average. The majority of women in the industry are still concentrated in administrative, sales and customer service roles (72 per cent of those in secretarial work are female), and the low remuneration for office administration perhaps helps account for the large gender pay gap in the sector.

According to PayScale Inc, the average male in the waste sector earns £30,075 a year, while his female counterpart brings in 31.5 per cent less, £20,614 (2012 ONS statistics show women in other sectors tend to fare better, nationally earning 10.5 per cent less than male counterparts). And, whereas women account for 34 per cent of managers across all UK industries, they only make up 18 per cent of managers in the waste world.

It may sound bleak, but the anecdotal evidence I receive in researching this piece paints a very different picture to the stark statistics; the overwhelming opinion is that the waste industry is, indeed, welcoming more women into its ranks (though perhaps just not as bin men...). Speaking about the dearth of female managers, Stephenson notes: “Twenty years ago, that probably would have been a lot less [than 18 per cent]. So, it’s beginning to change, but it still has a long way to go.”Things are notably more balanced in certain parts of the industry, of course.

At the big waste management companies, the number of women in key directorial roles is minimal: though Veolia Environment has just appointed its first female Chief Executive, for instance, the organisation’s other ‘Key Directors’ are all male; SITA UK’s management team is made up of 12 men and two women; and Cory Environmental’s ‘Senior Management Team’ is comprised of nine men and a female company secretary. This is not always the case, though, at third-sector organisations or at local authorities: Bryson Recycling’s management team, for instance, is 50 per cent female; Waste Watch has a virtually entirely female managerial team; and nine out of 24 members of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC) Executive are women.

Joy Blizzard, LARAC’s second, and current, female chair, notes the number of women in local authority waste roles is still increasing: “When I look out on LARAC audiences, I’ve seen a huge change in the number of youngish women there are now – it’s quite extraordinary, really.” She goes on to explain that councils have a good record of offering opportunities for women and for facilitating lateral career progression: “You do tend to find quite a lot of women in public sector waste and recycling positions, and they might have come in through other routes – they might have come in through education or communications, or from a sort of environmental and sustainability background.”

And there are reasons to believe the gender balance across all parts of waste is becoming, well, a bit more balanced as the industry becomes more complex. Stephenson notes: “Waste has become much more mainstream: there’s been an increase in the sort of technical and planning and regulatory types of roles… there’s been an increase in consultancy, and there’s been a greater emphasis on public engagement. The whole waste system, in terms of the types of operations that are being run, has become more complex. Put simply, it’s no longer a case of putting your bin out and everything just gets collected in one truck. It’s been a growth industry full stop, so one would have been very disappointed if women hadn’t started to have a role to play in that whole growth.”

As we attempt to move towards a circular economy with ‘waste as a resource’ as the increasingly popular mantra, opportunities for women will probably only increase. In her pithy way, Blizzard sums up: “We’re seeing far less now of the ‘bury and burn it’ brigade of grey-suited men who were about when I first came into the industry.” And Stephenson elaborates: “The waste industry has really woken up to the fact that it does need to also invest in engaging people and communities, so the sorts of areas where women have tended to develop their careers, whether that’s straightforward high-level marketing or more general, community engagement type of work.” Dr Margaret Bates, Manager of the Centre for Sustainable Wastes Management at the University of Northampton, puts it more bluntly when she says: “Now, most of it’s about changing hearts and minds, I would say, and women tend to be better at that.”

A note of caution on the inexorable rise of women in waste, though, comes courtesy of the difficult financial times. While we may feel that as an industry we’re becoming much more enlightened about the need to conserve resources, the austerity of the times will make it difficult to put enlightened ideas into practice. Lesley Letts, who began her career in waste at a local authority 20 years ago and now works in the private sector as Head of Materials Trading for May Gurney, reflects: “The hard-hitting financial realities of life actually could be getting in the way of progression in areas like resource management, not just in terms of roles opening up for women, but for progression overall. It’s almost like we’ve had to take a slight step back from some of the ‘nice to haves’ that we were doing well on a couple of years ago. There are things perhaps that we would like to be doing as an industry that are particularly linked to the sorts of roles that we see quite a few women in, which are being sidelined slightly at the moment because of the general economic situation and the need to cut costs.” Letts cites areas such as recycling education and marketing, where, as already mentioned, women in waste have often tended to develop their careers, as ripe for the chop.

In any case, the trend for getting more women into the world of waste in general is being reflected in higher education, where the number of women enrolled to study all facets of waste management is on the increase. Bates tells me that whereas 10 years ago, her students were mainly men, the balance on courses these days approaches gender equity, though it varies from year to year. “It used to be that we’d only have the women on what I’d derogatorily refer to as the ‘fluffy animals’ courses – you know, the very conservation-y type things”, she notes. “Whereas now we’ve got people who are much more interested in the more dirty side of waste management, wanting to go out and have a look at waste.”

Having emerged from these courses, women will encounter a workforce and working culture that is still male-dominated, of course, and that is not without its challenges. One of these comes in the still-popular form of doing business over a few beers. Letts explains that she sometimes finds this makes it more difficult to have ‘tricky conversations’, say, with male counterparts: “There’s still an element of ‘Let’s all meet up and we’ll get sloshed and have a late night’, and that’s how the relationships are maintained. And I do feel it’s not so easy for a woman.”

And, it’s not impossible that women might encounter varying degrees of sexism on the job. I can remember being all but patted on the head and told I was a ‘feisty little thing’ when I tried to engage in a serious discussion on incineration at a waste management do, and I imagine I’m not alone in having had such an experience. Indeed, Blizzard tells me a similar story, and also recalls an occasion in which the sexism was more overt (even if it was muttered behind her back): “I do remember once having a showdown with a contractor who shall remain nameless – ‘No f-ing woman is going to tell me how to run my contract.’ Fine. Contract was terminated soon after. I’m still here... I don’t think I saw him again after that, oddly enough.”

Blizzard adds, however: “In my career, it’s those kinds of things that stick out because in fairness there have been so few incidents like that, and I’m plucking at my second decade now. So, it’s not bad going, really.” Indeed, all of the women I speak to for my research likewise insist they have “never felt threatened in terms of gender” (Letts), that they’d “encourage all women to get into the industry – it’s fun” (Bates), and that “there’s room for a whole, wide range of skills that both men and women bring to waste” (Blizzard). Nazneem Grogan who, quite unusually, is a woman in charge of an incinerator, as Head of the Energy Centre at LondonWaste, goes so far as to say she doesn’t even notice the male-dominated culture, saying “when I go into a job, my gender is not important – how well I do the job is”.

Back in 2005, the Department for Education and Skills funded Women into Waste and Resource Management (WWARM), a mentorship programme to help female workers progress in this male-dominated industry. Currently, there’s nothing quite so structured as that, but women looking to engage with each other in the industry can now do so through an organisation called, appropriately, Women in Waste (WinW). Set up by Esther Kiddle via the Linked-In professional networking community, WinW will have its first event at RWM this year. Though there probably won’t be many bin women there, the women of the industry will doubtless come out in force and demonstrate that the male monopoly on the sector is indeed on its way out...