Water Woman Award - powerful stories behind amazing achievements

Julia Martin-Ortega, Professor of Ecological Economics in the Sustainability Research Institute at Leeds and Associate Director for water@leeds, outlines how the powerful stories behind the amazing achievements celebrated through the Water Woman Award serve to inspire others. Learn how the 2025 awards are helping transform the research culture at Leeds and discover how you can get involved.

Julia’s role is to lead and inspire others in the establishment of partnerships across the whole academic spectrum – and beyond – to support the water@leeds aspiration to help address global water challenges.

Her research aims to further the understanding of the relationships of communities and individuals with ecosystems, and how policy can best make use of this understanding for a more sustainable management of water and land resources.

The concept for the Water Woman Award originated from a desire to ensure everyone at water@leeds feels empowered to apply for grants to fund their outstanding research ideas.

I’m the Associate Director for water@leeds Mission 2, which is about enhancing and developing partnerships with global and local organisations to maximise the value of water research. We support our members in establishing strategic partnerships with a whole range of collaborators, and in the development of research proposals for a variety of funding bodies.

When I took up the role in 2018, one of my first objectives was to make sure we didn’t just support the ‘usual suspects’ – i.e. those people already doing quite well, who were being successful in their grant applications. We wanted to make sure we tapped into all available talent at the University, which is huge.

It’s a well-known fact that women, while they do amazing research, are less often principal investigators in research grants, particularly where large sums of funding are involved. It became imperative to us that we redressed that situation.

That’s how we arrived at the idea of identifying inspiring role models – water@leeds women who’d been successful in grant applications who could help us empower their colleagues to achieve the same level of success. Recognising these incredible achievements was the obvious next step in the process of shining a light on their outstanding efforts.

The idea was that those awarded – and all those who put themselves forward – would form a community of support and inspiration for others.

We realised very quickly that it made sense to expand this reward and inspiration programme to cover all our missions – and so the Water Woman Award was born.

Water Woman Award Inspirational Event 2023

Honouring achievements

By honouring the achievements of women whose work contributes to the scientific objectives of water@leeds – in securing competitive research funds, producing world-class research or achieving significant societal impact – the awards aim to highlight the efforts of women in an academic world in which the hurdles are still far greater for them.

We also understand women in supporting roles are also crucial for the delivery of such excellent research and impact, hence the Research Support category, as well as an award dedicated for early career researchers.

A key aspect of the Water Woman Award is the fact it’s based on two equally weighed criteria: the achievement applicants want to put forward and its inspirational power – based on their own interpretation of their own story – for other women.

Applicants not only get to showcase something they’re proud of, they can also share why they think their story can help others. It’s not just about the achievement but how you’ve achieved it. There’s power in the story behind any achievement, and that’s what we want to hear about. That’s what makes the Water Woman Award so special.

To make sure we fulfil the original aims of the initiative, every award edition is followed by what we call an Inspirational Programme. This is a programme of participatory events led by our award winners, which provides a platform to share lessons learned, together with a space for the stories to inspire others.

The award team ran its first online Inspirational Forum in 2020 during lockdown, bringing together a range of delegates from across disciplines to hear from our award winners.

Just two years later, the Water Woman Award went on to win the ‘Personal Development, Reward and Recognition’ category in the University’s inaugural Research Culture and Engaged for Impact Awards. We used our prizemoney to create and film an Inspirational Event in 2023, which brought together the award winners and female colleagues working across water@leeds to celebrate, reflect on shared experiences and think about how to make our practices even more inclusive.

This is how our awards have transformed into more of an initiative than a simple celebration. This is perfectly illustrated by the fact the 2025 Water Woman Award includes the support of the Carers in STEMM programme, led by one of our previous winners, Professor Laura Carter.

In response to a request from the water woman community, we’re also working towards the delivery of a ‘male allyship’ programme – to bring our colleagues on board in making sure the remaining barriers are removed for water women to thrive.

Without doubt, founding and running the Water Woman Award is the achievement I’m most proud of in my career. Women – we share, we care, which is what the awards are all about.

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