Women in Mountain Training Conference 2024

The second Women in Mountain Training Conference took place at Outward Bound Ullswater on 2-3 November 2024. 77 delegates, 17 delivery staff and 4 Mountain Training staff spent the weekend learning from each other and developing their networks to support their plans for the future. The Outward Bound Trust felt like true partners in the delivery of this event and we’re very grateful for their longstanding support in effecting change, and for providing an excellent venue. It was also great to have Cressida Allwood and Emma Travers from BMC, Abbi Blakey from NICAS and David Monteith from Mountain Heritage Trust there too, to represent other key partners in our sector.

Huge thanks to Racheal Crewesmith for hosting the weekend and keeping everyone on track.

The workshops available at this year’s conference were shaped by feedback from the first conference and included some practical outdoor sessions as well as some popular presenters from last time.

View resources from this year's conference

Women-specific sessions included Dr Natalie Brown's 'Women's hormone lifecycles', Jemma Powell's 'Training during pregnancy and post-partum' and Aneela McKenna and Kate O'Brien's 'Tackling discriminatory behaviour'. Other thought-provoking classroom-based sessions covered topics such as running a business, knowing when you're ready for assessment, understanding leadership styles, exploring self-belief and the confidence cult(ure) and progressing to working on courses.

Steph Wetherell from Every Body Outdoors and Carla Khouri from Black Girls Hike opened the conference by sharing their experiences of campaigning for more plus size outdoor clothing and supporting more Black women into the hills - their essential work is helping to build a more diverse community from the ground up and we must continue to support and champion their efforts.

An afternoon session delivered by Suzie Dick, lecturer in Teacher Education at Queen Margaret University, and Nicola Foyle, a teacher with a specialism in SEN, focused on neurodivergence in the industry. It was a highly informative session and an opportunity to understand the practical steps that can be taken to positively influence a person’s anxiety levels and ability to engage with a session.

Four all-day sessions, covering everything from smart climbing gear placement with Katie Mackay, and mastering navigation with Kristine Quayle, to exploring flora and fauna with Mel Sugden, and honing group management skills with Lena Hunter. These sessions received great feedback and equipped the delegates with practical skills to increase their confidence.

Saturday evening’s all-conference session about women’s hormones started with some excellent myth-busting about menstruation and menopause/peri-menopause that prompted some animated conversations and many lightbulb moments. The session quickly embraced a question-and-answer format as the audience wanted to know more. Natalie did a great job of providing informative answers and if the session had been double the length, we probably still wouldn’t have got through them all!

Sunday morning’s group session about tackling discriminatory behaviour was delivered by diversity consultant Aneela McKenna and Outward Bound’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity Strategic Lead Kate O’Brien. As the audience we reflected on our own experience of sexism (common) and subsequently on the times we’d intervened as a bystander after observing sexism (much less common). It stimulated questions about whose job is was to combat discrimination and bias (in all forms) and Aneela provided some great suggestions for how to do this.

Following two more workshops there was an opportunity to gather in smaller groups for some peer to peer discussion based on the qualifications people were actively pursuing, before coming together for final farewell.

The consensus in the closing session was that the future of women having positive experiences with Mountain Training qualifications and joining the delivery workforce depends on our ability to influence those not present at the conference. That’s why we’ve brought together some of the resources from the weekend and we encourage everyone to consider how they might increase their understanding of women's experiences, specifically in relation to hormonal changes, body size, ethnicity, neurodivergence and perceived confidence (some focus topics from this year's conference).

We encourage you to pick a resource and share it with a friend, a colleague or a family member. Any positive action will benefit a much wider community, so everyone stands to gain.

Resources

We need to talk about confidence - Breaking Binaries Research blog