Our Story: Why I Founded Gender Responsive Insight

I didn’t set out to build a consultancy. I set out to understand women’s lives, really understand them and ensure women’s and girls’ voices were amplified. The more time I have spent listening to women whose experiences were shaped by trauma, poverty, violence, and systems that didn’t see them clearly, the more impossible it became to ignore the gaps.

For years, I’ve worked as an academic, researcher, and evaluator across universities and public services. I’ve sat in refuges, prisons, community centres, and cramped office corners listening to women tell stories they’d never told out loud before. These most certainly included stories of survival, resilience, and resourcefulness. Women also, time and again, spoke of being dismissed, misunderstood, or pushed from service to service because their needs didn’t fit neatly into a box.

Those conversations changed me. They still do.

Between 2016-2021 I chaired Nottingham’s Response to Complexity (R2C) Steering Group, bringing together a whole systems approach for holistic wrap-around services supporting women subjected to domestic and sexual violence alongside experiencing severe and multiple disadvantage. I’ve led research that shaped the Lincolnshire Women’s Strategy and helped create the Lincolnshire Concordat. With a fabulous team of researchers we were commissioned to develop a theory of change and evaluate the Lincolnshire Women and Girls Whole Systems Approach. I now chair the Women’s Severe and Multiple Disadvantage Workstream for Nottingham City.

Across all of this work, one thing has been consistent: women’s experiences are gendered, relational, and shaped by systems that rarely account for either.

I founded Gender Responsive Insight because I wanted to create a space where evidence, practice, and lived experience could come together to drive real, meaningful change. A space where services and organisations could be supported and not judged to become more trauma‑informed, more relational, more equitable, and more effective for women and girls. Prompting organisations to ask: how gender responsive are we?

My research continues to challenge assumptions about women’s lives. My recent work on Desistance Emotional Work (DEW) with Dr Lauren Hall (University of Nottingham) explores the emotional labour women provide to support their partner’s or family member’s desistance from offending. This labour is invisible in most policy conversations, yet central to understanding gendered harm and resilience.

And yes, outside all of this, I’m a lifelong Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. I chair the club’s Equality Advisory Group and sit on the Fan Advisory Board, because gender‑responsive practice doesn’t stop at the boundaries of criminal justice or health, it belongs everywhere women show up. I’ve worked with Wolves to raise awareness of the impact of domestic abuse and the need for gender equality through White Ribbon campaigning.

Gender Responsive Insight is the culmination of everything I care about: listening deeply, challenging assumptions, amplifying

women’s voices, and helping systems evolve so that no woman is ever seen as “too complex” again.