Emily Timmins joined Severn Trent at 18 on a work experience placement that was meant to involve filing. By day two she was in PPE on a sewage treatment works, the only woman operator in her team. She stayed 28 years. Today she is Director of Water Recycling at Anglian Water, an operational executive reporting to the CEO with responsibility for around 2,500 people. On this episode of the Exec Exchange, part of our series on women leading in the water sector, she spoke to Piers Clark about what has changed across those three decades, what has not, and why the sector’s investment plans depend on solving it.<\/p>\n
Timmins describes an immediate reaction to stepping onto an operational site: purpose and people. The purpose was protecting customers and protecting the environment, a reason to get out of bed that she has never needed to look for since. The people were the second draw. She found a workforce that cared deeply about the job, and that combination set the direction for everything that followed.<\/p>\n
Her first substantial role was not the process science post she expected as a graduate. Severn Trent put her in charge of 22 tanker drivers in Stoke-on-Trent. Her approach on arrival was to put on her PPE and ask to go out in the trucks, on the basis that she needed to see the work from the drivers’ perspective before she could remove anything standing in their way.<\/p>\n
There was no senior woman ahead of her to learn from. Timmins was, as she puts it, fighting on two fronts: becoming a leader in an era when the sector still thought mainly in terms of management, and doing it as a woman in a heavily male environment.<\/p>\n
She draws a firm line between the two. Management, in her framing, is tasks, issues and the deployment of resource. Leadership is inspiration, motivation and the why. It means standing at the front, being willing to challenge, and what she calls ruthless caring: a belligerent conviction that the work can be done better, held alongside genuine care for the people doing it. The command-and-control style common in the 1980s and 1990s sat wrong with her instinctively, and pushing back against it made her own path harder.<\/p>\n
Anglian Water is the largest water company in the UK geographically, with a long coastline, heavy land drainage and a drought-prone region. It covers the country’s largest population of chalk streams and serves a strongly rural area that Timmins calls the breadbasket of the UK. Water in the environment is a material challenge across all of it.<\/p>\n
Her teams carry a large share of that responsibility. Around 70% of Anglian’s water recycling centers discharge to the headwaters of watercourses, which makes them the main contributory factor in the environmental performance of the region’s rivers.<\/p>\n
Timmins is clear that the number of women in operations remains far too low and that the sector has not worked hard enough to make the roles attractive. She points to three connected causes: visibility and bias at the point of entry, working patterns and standby hours that have not been rethought, and a culture and progression model that does not yet hold onto women through the life stages where they most need it to.<\/p>\n
Anglian’s response in 2024 was structural. About 18 months into her tenure, the business created an entirely new operational leader position as an intermediary step between frontline operations and traditional frontline leadership, and went to market with different recruitment strategies and a different role design. It attracted a significant number of women, particularly those entering on second careers. The measurable outcome was not limited to representation. Morale improved and mental health improved, which Timmins attributes to better overall balance in the teams rather than to the presence of women as such.<\/p>\n
Half her senior leadership team are now women, three of them working part-time. Her view is that these arrangements need far more visibility than they currently get.<\/p>\n
Asked to answer the cynic who questions why gender diversity matters, Timmins goes straight to capacity. Water companies and their supply chains have to invest heavily in this AMP period and have to grow to do it. That growth cannot come from the same pool of people, using the same strategies and the same assumptions that the sector has relied on before.<\/p>\n
Beyond headcount, she makes the standard but evidenced case that diversity of thought produces more resilient businesses, more innovation and better ideas. The conclusion she draws is that water, along with other engineering and infrastructure industries, has a business reason to treat this seriously rather than a reputational one.<\/p>\n
Timmins talks about this from direct experience, having been perimenopausal for nearly 10 years. She frames the window between 35 and 55 as a compression of demands: childcare early on, perimenopause in the middle, and caring responsibilities for elderly relatives at the far end. Pushed together, that is a difficult stretch of a career for many women.<\/p>\n
On menopause specifically she offers a distribution rather than a generalization. Around 20% of women have no symptoms at all, 20% have extreme and debilitating symptoms, and 60% sit somewhere on the continuum between. Her own experience has included exhaustion, brain fog and a loss of sense of self, with the knock-on effect of lost confidence and reduced resilience in the face of the job.<\/p>\n
What made the difference for her was being openly honest about it, which made it straightforward for colleagues and for her own line management to offer support. Anglian Water’s private health cover includes menopause, giving access to appropriate medication and to support networks. She is candid that this is not universal. Across her career she has watched women fade away during these years, and the sector loses experience and skill it cannot afford to lose.<\/p>\n
The advice that shaped her own approach came from her uncle when she took the Anglian role. She had asked him how she needed to be. He told her there was only one thing she needed to be, and that was compassionate.<\/p>\n
The first is to back herself. Timmins is open about the internal voices that told her she was not good enough, and about the moments she now recognizes as having held herself back. Coaching and sponsorship have since brought those voices under control.<\/p>\n
The second is to stay curious, insistently so. Her argument is that leaders and senior experts improve by looking left and right rather than only forwards and backwards.<\/p>\n
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