Full Fibre UK ISP Jurassic Fibre Highlights Big Rise in Women Workers

Network builder and broadband ISP Jurassic Fibre, which is rolling out a 1Gbps+ Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the South West of England, has today celebrated a 209% rise in the number of women in its workforce in just two years (now accounting for 30% of the company’s total).

At present Jurassic Fibre is being backed by an investment of £250m from Fern Trading to help it cover 500,000 premises across the South West (i.e. Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset) with a new full fibre network by the end of 2025 (covering 30 towns and villages). So far, the operator has already passed 100,000 premises (June 2022), but a lot of that is now being built by female engineers.

Marking International Women’s Day (Wednesday 8th March), Jurassic Fibre, which was founded in 2018, has announced an increase from 45 to 139 women in its workforce since 2020 (in total, they employ over 460 people at their office base in Exeter and smaller base in Honiton). At 30% of the company’s total workforce, this is substantially higher than the UK tech industry average of 21.6% (ONS).

The roles being taken by women include Customer Connections Engineers, Director of Geographic Information System and Network Design, Field Data Surveyors, Tree Surgeon Surveyors and Network Designers. Jurassic added that their employee package is aimed at recruiting more women and includes various benefits, such as part time and flexible working, job sharing, working from home, and a menopause policy including a regular menopause café.

Victoria Winner, JF’s Chief People Officer, said:

“Jurassic Fibre aims to be ground-breaking in every way, and we specifically set out to target women into jobs to try and do better than the industry average. We’re really pleased to be able to confirm we’ve achieved this, but of course we won’t stop there and want that figure to increase in years to come.

Our flexible working policy means that working parents don’t have to choose between being in the office or doing the school run. We can agree to job shares or adjust start and finish times. We have people coming into the office after they’ve dropped children off, or leaving early to collect them. There’s adoption leave as well as maternity and paternity leave, and a healthcare cash plan which covers employees’ children too. People are at the centre of what we do at Jurassic Fibre, everyone is a valued member of the team, throughout their lives and careers.

We want to attract the best women in the region to work for us, in a highly competitive and rapidly-changing marketplace. The key is flexibility. Women are at the forefront of pushing the world of productive, creative, rewarding employment away from rigid working hours and systems. We’ve specifically implemented policies that mean all genders achieve a great work/life balance.”

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