Lisa Edwards wanted to be one of the Lads. That is, a member of the Liverpool Agricultural Discussion Society (Lads), an all-male group for farmers that meets monthly for dinner and to listen to a talk.

Last week, she complained on Twitter about Lads voting against a proposal to allow female members and guests to their meetings, and was surprised to receive a backlash. 

Although plenty of female farmers agreed that barring women from valuable networking opportunities was outdated, some men defended the vote.

All-male spaces such as Lads were important, ran their argument – men needed a safe space to discuss their mental health, particularly in an industry such as agriculture where loneliness, stress and financial problems can trigger depression.

This might be particularly important when nine in 10 farmers aged below 40 said that poor mental health was the biggest hidden problem in agriculture, according to a 2021 survey by the Farm Safety Foundation.

Mrs Edwards, 53, and her husband Simon, 56, put forward the proposal to the group after realising that if they had had daughters instead of sons, their children would have been barred from going to meetings with their father.

‘Women should not be discriminated against’

“If they want to run a farm, they should have equal opportunities [and] they shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their sex,” said Mrs Edwards, who farms 900 acres of cereals and potatoes in Merseyside. 

“Networking is so important, especially at the start of your career, and we wanted to make sure women coming into the industry would have that opportunity to network with other young farmers.”

She argued that while the rules might have made sense when the group was founded in 1928, in 2022 women are much more common in agriculture – her son’s cohort at farming college was divided 50-50 between men and women.

The couple recommended two ways that the group could rewrite its 100-year-old rules: either women could become full members or they could attend the dinners as guests.

However, the proposals were defeated in a landslide, with 90 per cent of members voting to block female members.

“We thought they would vote to have women at least as guests as a compromise,” said Mrs Edwards, sitting in the kitchen of her new-build modernist home, the room lit by windows along the high ceilings. “I didn’t expect it to be 90 per cent against.”

She expressed her dismay at the Lads vote on Twitter: