Girls Can Do Anything Inspirational Women - Sue Wimpenny
Not all the people featured in our Girls Can Do Anything Gallery of Inspirational Women are famous. Some are just ordinary, extraordinary people going about their daily lives. They are women who are busy making a living doing the jobs they love. People like Sue Wimpenny. She's not famous, she's not on telly (though she was in The Independent once) but she IS doing a job that many of us would not expect a woman to do.
So if you have a child who's interested in something different, get online and find someone like them, who is doing it too. Show your kids that they can do whatever they flipping well want, regardless of the bodies they were born into!
Anyway, here's why we chose Sue Wimpenny:
Sue Wimpenny - Builder and CEO (UK)
I mean,
how many women builders have you ever met?
I haven’t met any and, I’m ashamed to say, had not even considered that
women builders were even a thing until recently. Interior designers, yes, painters and
decorators - well I’ve seen a few now, thanks to DIYSOS. But actual
builders?
Then,
while doing some research for the Girls
Can Do Anything gallery of inspirational women, I discovered Sue Wimpenny.
In the
book, we tell young readers that girls can be and do anything they choose. We
tell them girls can be good at science or writing or music or maths. We tell
them girls can be firefighters, lawyers, sports people, lorry drivers and
builders. So I thought I’d better find some examples of real women who really
ARE doing these things and doing them well.
Enter
Sue Wimpenny. Not only is she a builder, she has built (pardon the pun) her own
construction company called The Lady Builder.
It’s a successful building company that does everything you’d expect…
they build things and refurbish things and no doubt make a lot of dust in the
process. In itself this is not remarkable.
But the fact that this company was founded and is run by a woman - IS. I don’t know much about Sue but I do know
that she’s a successful woman operating in what is a predominantly male world
and for me, that is what makes her outstanding. And for children to know that
there are real women doing this kind of work - well I think that’s incredibly
empowering.