Movement for women plumbers goes global
A UK-BASED Turkish Cypriot is continuing to make headlines after her project to make women more independent by becoming qualified plumbers began to balloon into a global movement.
Founder of Stopcocks Women Plumbers, the only female plumbing business in the UK, Hatice Hasan, 56, is expanding the company and increasing the number of women plumbers in the UK and elsewhere.
The developments follow a feature in Cyprus Today in early 2016 which reported on Ms Hasan’s visit to Africa, where she taught locals how to preserve water and use plumbing in drought conditions.
Stopcocks has since become such a nationwide phenomenon in the UK that the BBC World Service interviewed her for a programme called The Conversation, which was broadcast on Monday and can be heard on the BBC website.
Ms Hasan said: “We have self-employed Stopcocks Women Plumbers and gas engineers covering central and south London, Hertfordshire, Dorset, Oldham, Rochdale and the Calder Valley.”
She said conferences were held called Women Installers Together (WIT) which began when plumbing manufacturers made contact with her to establish how the numbers of female plumbers and gas engineers could be increased.
“As a result, Gas Safe, the body that regulates gas engineers in the UK, for the first time estimated the number of female gas engineers, although we still don’t have an accurate number,” she said.
“It estimated that out of over 100,000 registered gas engineers only 500 of them are female, which is a very low number that we are keen to see become bigger.”
Two conferences have been held, both in London, with the second, larger one taking place in July.
“My dream is to create a legacy so there will be a strong movement and more women to work within it when I’m gone,” said Ms Hasan.
Talking about the BBC programme, she said: “It features me talking to a woman plumber from New York, Judaline Cassidy, who also does empowerment workshops with young girls.”
Regarding her work in Kenya, which she visited in 2015, she said: “We’re talking to a Kenyan woman named Jiku who wants to improve the quality of training for plumbers there.
“She is now in Kenya finding out about . . . training there and when she returns to the UK we will do some planning to create a plumbing school in Kenya that will welcome female and male students.”