I run Rose Tinsley Consulting, a small GIS and spatial data consultancy. Before that: Essex Highways, Crossrail, Tideway, Savills, and Invesco. Eight-plus years of the same pattern, wherever I landed. I was usually the only woman in the technical meeting. Not always, just more often than not…
I fell into my area of tech almost by accident. I dropped out of college and went into an apprenticeship at Essex Highways instead, and that’s where I got introduced to GIS: the bit where messy, real-world data about roads and assets has to be turned into something a system can actually use. I found out I liked the part everyone else seemed to treat as a chore. I’ve been doing some version of that ever since, moving from local government into major infrastructure, then into property and asset management, picking up a wider data and spatial remit at every stop.
Somewhere in the middle of that, through the Covid years, I did a master’s at the University of Leeds, studying part-time between 2020 and 2023 while still working. No campus, no cohort in a room together, just a laptop and whatever hours were left after the day job. It’s not the way I’d have chosen to do it, but it’s the way it happened.
I really enjoyed the work I did, and some of them I absolutely loved. Essex Highways taught me how much of the built environment runs on data nobody outside the industry ever thinks about. Crossrail and Tideway showed me what that looks like at a scale most people never encounter. Savills and Invesco moved me from public infrastructure into private capital, where the questions about data change but the underlying skill doesn’t. I had some fantastic mentors over thecours of my carer, and without them, I wouldnt be where I am today.
But there’s a particular kind of tired that comes from being the one who has to explain herself a little more, prove herself a little longer, and never quite have anyone in the room who’s been through the same thing. Not hostility, usually. Just a low, constant background hum of being the exception rather than the norm. Eight years in, that hum hadn’t gone away - I have just gotten better at ignoring it.
Going out on my own with Rose Tinsley Consulting changed the shape of the problem rather than solving it. I’m no longer the only woman in someone else’s meeting; I’m often the only woman in the room, full stop, because there’s no room beyond the one I bring with me. That’s when it became obvious that the missing thing wasn’t a better job or a more senior title. It was a room that already existed, full of women who’d recognise the hum immediately and not need it explained.
Essex Women in Tech started as a LinkedIn post and an idea, and I genuinely didn’t know if anyone would turn up to the first meetup. Five women did, at Patch in Chelmsford. We talked about work, about career paths, about the stuff nobody puts on a CV, and it was the best two hours I’d had in ages.
That’s the whole model, really! No five-year plan, no mission statement written before anyone showed up. The people in the room decide what this becomes, meetup by meetup. I’d rather it grow slowly and stay honest than get big fast and turn into another logo on a slide.
Outside of Essex Women in Tech, Rose Tinsley Consulting keeps me doing the work I actually like: solving spatial and data problems for clients who need someone senior without the overhead of a full team. It’s a small, deliberately unglamorous business, and it’s the reason I have the flexibility to run a community that doesn’t answer to anyone but the people who turn up.
If you’re reading this and thinking you’d have come to that first one, come to the next.