Twice the work, half the recognition? How women in farming are closing the authority gap

The UK’s Premier Agricultural Machinery and Technology Show

The inaugural 100 Women in Agriculture reception, hosted by Baroness Kate Rock, Dorset farmer and British Farming Awards Woman of the Year 2025, and Farmers Guardian, brought women and guests from across the supply chain together to celebrate women in farming.

At the heart of the event, held in the House of Lords on October 20, was a discussion on the authority gap and posed the question: Twice as hard, half the recognition? Panellists were asked who gets listened to in the countryside, and what it costs them to be heard.

Guests heard from Baroness Minette Batters, the former NFU president; Helen Rebanks, farmer and author; Debbie Airey, head of agriculture at Brown & Brown; and Nicole Moore, a fieldsports and conservation enthusiast. The mic then went round the room, so anyone who wanted to could join in.

Baroness Batters said she now felt free to speak in a way she could not while leading a trade association for men and women alike. She did not dodge the question of whether things had changed.

“The authority gap is still there,” she told guests, and the same was true of having to work harder for recognition.

“As women, we definitely feel we’ve got to work harder, and in many cases, I think we are judged for that.”

She recalled being warned, when she first considered standing for national office in the NFU, that she would never command the same respect as a man with the media or anyone else.

She is now ‘enormously grateful’ for those words, she said, because they made her so determined. The same conversation turned to who would do the shopping.

She argued that some of the gap is down to women themselves. “We question ourselves. We are our greatest critics,” she said, adding that women tend to deflect credit quickly onto other people.

She still sees real change. Pointing to the women in the room, including those now holding NFU office, she said: “Success brings success, and success is what inspires other people to think, ‘Yeah, I can do that.'” She was also candid that confidence does not simply grow with age, adding: “I feel as challenged now, if not more so, than I did when I was younger.”

Helen Rebanks took the conversation in a different direction. “I’m here to champion the farmer’s wife,” she said, acknowledging that some in the room might want to run from the term.

Helen’s Sunday Times best-selling memoir, The Farmer’s Wife, has recently been turned into a play and follows three generations of women – a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter – over the course of one day on a working Cumbrian family farm. Staged in the round, the play explores the beauty and weight of a life rooted in the land, shaped by the real voices of women within the local farming community.

Her argument is that the label hides how much work sits behind it. Asked what she does on the farm, she said the better question is what she doesn’t do: the paperwork, the general management, the care, the children. She stressed that she has never been held back from doing what she wanted, and that she actively chooses to run things behind the scenes while her husband, upland farmer and well-known author James Rebanks works outside.

What troubles her is how little value is placed on that role. On family farms, she said, the family is the unit of production, yet the farmer is revered as the most important job. “He [James] couldn’t do what he does without me doing what I do, and which is absolutely vital,” she said. Through her book, podcasts and events, women have told her they had never before felt ‘seen, heard, and valued’.

Raising the value of that contribution, she said, is essential.

Debbie Airey, head of agriculture at Brown and Brown, which sponsored the event, described building her own brokerage while raising four children, and later as a single mother. She was the only female founder among 174 brokers in a group of men, and she is proud of it. She is just as proud that she never missed a sports day or a parents’ evening, even if it meant starting work at 5am.

Debbie said she has never felt intimidated in a boardroom because she speaks only when she knows what she is talking about. Some men, she said, have found her plain speaking intimidating, which she finds ‘odd’. She put that down to being ‘a Northern girl’.

She also admitted to nerves before addressing 80 farmers at a recent farmers’ meeting, a more daunting audience than the supportive women in the room. It went well, helped by an 89-year-old farmer who kept prodding her with his crutch for her attention. Much of her work, she added, is simply listening to farmers when things go wrong.

Nicole Moore spoke about access, which her work depends on. She has been shooting for almost 20 years. In her mid-twenties, she said, a mentor told her to get a letter and have five men vouch for her before approaching landowners. She did not wait. She knocked on the door of a farmer whose crops were covered in pigeons and offered her skills and expertise along with her licence, her insurance and her gun.

She said landowners have questioned her least, and described shooting on the land of an 84-year-old farmer who still calves her own cows. When Nicole offered her a joint of venison from her own land, it was something nobody had ever done for her.

The relationship she fostered also enabled her to bring people who are new to shooting and the countryside onto the land, with the landowner’s blessing. “I’m paying it forward,” she said, and she sees the landowner as doing the same by giving that access.

Like Baroness Batters, she accepts that women get asked more questions. “Why would you be questioned because of your gender? Because of your age?” she said.

As a woman of colour, she added, she cannot walk into a room unnoticed, and she tries to treat being challenged as an opening. “This is an opportunity,” she said, whether it turns into a debate or a chance to educate.

“I see it as an opportunity to do just that and by being challenged I am being given an opportunity to give my opinion. It is the up to us how we choose to use our voice in that moment.”

A question from the floor, from Amie Burke, agri supply chain manager for UK Agri-Tech Centre, asked how women in male-dominated industries can win authority without adopting what she called masculine energy.

Baroness Batters said it was the thing she has struggled with most. In boardrooms early in her career she felt ‘incredibly upset inside’ and feared bursting into tears. Her answer was to keep herself calm, ‘dial back’ and keep the dialogue going. She has also learned to value argument. “A good disagreement will make your argument much stronger,” she said, adding that she would not have said that 10 years ago.

Debbie Airey said her confidence comes from preparation. Nicole Moore added that being questioned means you are not being ignored.

The panel did not agree on everything, and that was the point. One panellist spoke of choice, another of persistence, another of managing emotion in the room. What they shared was a view that the gap between women’s contribution and women’s recognition has narrowed but not closed. However, by working together, nurturing allies and with the power of campaigns such as 100 Women, the industry can bring about positive change.

With thanks to Brown & Brown Insurance for sponsoring the event.

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