Leading Rag week marching bands as a drum majorette at Exeter University made Teresa Rees curious, on a visit to a military establishment as the Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Wales, to find out why female recruits were suffering hip inflammation and sometimes dislocation.
She discovered that they were marching according to the regulation stride for the armed forces, calculated on the basis of the average stride of men. Women were therefore overstriding during their entire training. This came to inspire her particular approach to gender mainstreaming.
Another inspiration in her life and work was her mother who, although she was involved in the family clothing business during Terry’s childhood, had worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war, and later served as a parliamentary aide for many years.
Paul Drew
I first met Teresa Rees fairly soon after I moved to Cardiff in the late 1970s, when we both became involved in projects monitoring and evaluating the range of programmes being developed to help young unemployed people.
The fact that we were able to work together on a project was quite unusual given we were from different disciplines and institutions, and reflected her focus on the work in hand rather than the internal politics.
However, perhaps my fondest memory of Terry is of playing table tennis together one evening after a long day at a conference. It was a way of keeping our spirits up in what were fairly tough times both in universities and more widely as unemployment kept climbing.
Charles Jackson
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