Name: Dipalee Jukes
Job Title: Co-Founder, Co-CEO
Company: Ground & Water

Dipalee is Co-Founder/Co-CEO of Ground & Water, a ground engineering consultancy, founded in 2009 alongside her university friend, Francis Williams.
Dipalee’s a South Asian business leader, mum of three, geologist, engineer, co-host of the Chai & Chat Engineering podcast, school governor, speaker on STEM and female leadership, gender equality advocate, on the inclusion list of Inspirational Business Women in STEM & Construction and Everywoman’s Entrepreneur for Good in 2023.
Her purpose in life is to work towards Gender Equality.
She’s passionate about inspiring and empowering girls, women, and women of colour into the industry, and supporting them in their careers.

What or who inspired you to join the geoscience industry?
I chose this career because I have always enjoyed geography for as long as I can remember. I always loved learning about the world and a favourite pastime of mine was studying maps! During secondary school, I had an inspiring geography teacher named Mr Vasilli. I enjoyed the physical geography aspects (e.g. volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics) and when I was 15, I remember watching and enjoying the Geological Society’s Christmas lectures, which naturally led me towards geology although I didn’t study the subject until university.
Coming out of university, I struggled to work out what career path I wanted to take. I eventually found out that geotechnical and environmental engineering covered some of what I had learnt at university, as well as being very practical, dealing with problem solving and being creative. Francis, my friend and later business partner, was already working at a geotechnical consultancy in the South-East and told me about a vacancy.

What does a typical day entail?
I am fortunate these days that we have a whole team of engineers, technicians and a senior management team to deal with the day-to-day operations and projects, which frees me up to largely work on the business and do some vital outreach work.
A typical day starts anywhere between 5.15am and 6.30am. I do my morning rituals (e.g. meditation, exercise, reading and journaling) in preparation for the day ahead. This is then followed by an hour of chaos whilst we get the kids up and ready. After the school run, I start work around 9:00am.
Sometimes I will have two hours of internal team meetings, comprising of 121 sessions with those in my leadership team or, a board meeting followed by a team huddle with the wider team before spending a bit of time looking at emails, marketing and social media.
After lunch, I might head into Central London for a client account meeting, a networking event or to work on business strategy. The late afternoon would be spent back at my desk, finishing up work and preparing for the following day. Once my day work is finished, I put on my ‘parenting’ hat and go to work in a different capacity!

What are the most challenging aspects of your day-to-day role?
I still wear many hats, from marketing, PR, sales and business development to working on the organisational culture and long-term vision and goals for the business.

The challenge is always fitting everything I have on my ‘to-do’ list into the allotted time. Coupled with this, making sure I am focusing on what matters most and where I can add the most value. This can be difficult when it’s your own business.

What areas of the industry are you most passionate about?
For me, it is about empowering and inspiring more women, and women of colour, into the industry and to go for leadership roles. We do not have enough diversity at the table. At the same time, we know that diverse teams are better teams, with better decision-making abilities and outcomes.
I am passionate about growing and developing the next generation of leaders, whilst helping to create a bigger and better table!
I also want to see more sustainable business practices and innovation in our industry, from using less or no plastic in the drilling process, reducing embedded carbon in foundations, to having electrically powered machinery for all our site works. This will require a collaborative approach between us all.

As a woman of colour, did you face any setbacks when entering the industry, and when setting up your company? How did you overcome these challenges?
I truly believe that representation matters, “if you can see you, you can be it”. The problem for me was, when I came into the industry 22 years ago, there were no visible role models. In fact, I only started seeing other people like me a few years ago.
What I didn’t realise is how this had limited my self-belief and my confidence. This likely held me back from trying to achieve more at an earlier stage of my career and to be more open with people.
I felt one of the biggest challenges I faced in the industry was being taken seriously as a woman. I used to receive lots of business correspondence addressed as Mr Jukes. Early in my career, I was also unfortunately subject to racism onsite.
Setting up my own company was a huge challenge. I didn’t have years and years of experience in the industry. What I lacked in experience, I made up for in ambition, drive and resourcefulness. I am the daughter of Indian immigrants, who came to this country with nothing but an incredible work ethic. I believe that has given me a lot of grit.
It’s been a combination of hard work, discipline, being consistent in my approach, patience, surrounding myself with the right people who pushed and supported me along the way, and a big dose of courage to get to where I am now.
Being an Indian woman at the helm of a geotechnical consultancy, I had no choice but to embrace my uniqueness. I was on the outside from day one. Most people in my industry were white men.
I overcame these setbacks by having some amazing people around me such as Francis. We have always been an equal partnership in the company and bring different strengths and qualities to the table. Behind the scenes, my husband has always been my counsel.

What are your proudest achievements to date?
Apart from having the guts to start the business in 2009 and build a successful company whilst simultaneously having three children, I courageously went back to studying last year and put myself through a mini-MBA style course for business leaders at Oxford University. I completed the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Programme and graduated at Oxford in January 2024, which was incredible.
Another big career highlight was being on the winning inclusion list of Inspirational Business Women in STEM & Construction 2023, presented at the House of Lords by Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe. A ‘pinch me’ moment for sure!
And finally, winning the Everywoman Award for the Entrepreneur for Good in December 2023 was a very humbling and proud moment for me.

As a mother, how do you manage a work/life balance?
Honestly, with difficulty – it takes careful planning, learning to say ‘no’ occasionally, delegating, prioritising your health and getting help from others!

My husband and I have an equal partnership and share responsibilities at home. To enable me to work, I also have a network of help and support, from my mum and childcare to friends and neighbours stepping in if required. It takes a village to raise a child.

I do pride myself on being super organised, it is probably one of my strengths. I use this to help me plan, prioritise and prepare so that life can go as smoothly as possible, and I can achieve most of what I set out to do, including intentional time to rest and exercise.
Ground & Water were highly commended in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion category of the Ground Engineering Awards in 2024 for your work on Gender Equality, could you explain more about the work you are doing with respect to Gender Equality?

I’m a huge advocate for talking about and promoting Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Industry and beyond. I want to show my children that women can be amazing mothers, business leaders, and changemakers. It is vital we inspire and educate these young minds with all the possibilities of who they can become in the world.

Women make up 16.5% of all engineers according to Engineering UK’s March 2022 Report. The statistic for women of colour in this sector is only ~2% or less. Improving these numbers doesn’t just help social justice and sustainability issues, it makes business and economic sense.

Our mission at Ground & Water is to educate, inspire and empower.

I use my platform in the workplace and in industry to create more equality and remove the stigma around female issues that people don’t talk, e.g., periods, pregnancy, motherhood, post-natal depression, and perimenopause/menopause. I openly discuss these issues in my male dominated workplace, in interviews, presentations, panel discussions and on social media. Through sharing own experiences, I am creating a new culture at Ground & Water and beyond, with the aim to disrupt the industry to change how things should be done to ensure women are included in the decisions.

I co-host the Chai & Chat Engineering podcast, alongside my co-hosts, Era Shah and Malika Kapasi, both female south Asian civil engineers. Our aim is to raise the profile of the amazing women out in the engineering and construction industry to create more role models young girls and women can aspire to and resonate with. The podcast combines our love of the built environment, female leadership and allyship, the power of role models, our cultural heritage and our genuine love of tea! Our key objective for the podcast is to promote career pathways, challenge stereotypes and what we/leaders can do to be more inclusive, share diverse stories about upbringings, challenges and ambitions for the future, inspire the younger generation, particularly from underrepresented backgrounds to be part of an industry that positively contributes to shaping the built environment, is creative and exciting.
Last year, I teamed up with Inspire Girls UK and embarked on going into girls’ secondary schools to talk about STEM careers. I have been involved with the London Build Expo for the past three years, both as a panellist on the D&I stage, where I spoke about breaking the bias around women in engineering, and as a diversity in construction ambassador.

I’m an active member of the Women in Engineering (WES) Society, where I have presented a webinar and taken part in their podcast series, “Humans of WES”.

In October 2023, I hosted a table talk discussion at the Inspiring Women in Construction & Engineering conference, on ‘Overcoming challenges for racial and ethnic minority professionals in engineering’.

I do talks and presentations at local girls’ secondary schools to promote STEM careers have some more in the pipeline. I sit on the governing board of a London primary school, a position held for >3 years, and last year became involved in a business roundtable discussion, working with The Royal Foundation of The Prince and Princess of Wales to establish a Business Taskforce for Early Childhood.

I have recently become a speaker for the Stemazing community and will be doing a talk for them in January 2025.

I am also currently involved in the policy forum for Supporting Female Entrepreneurship alongside Goldman Sachs and Oxford University. This will include how to help ethnic minority female entrepreneurs.

Lastly, I am an everyday role model, mentor, coach, and advocate for the women inside of my company and in my network.

What advice would you give young females who are considering a career in geosciences?
• Join some professional networks early on and go to some industry events.
• Start growing your network.
• Be proactive in reaching out to companies for job opportunities, even work placements, and do your research.
• Say YES to opportunities, even if you don’t know how to do something yet.
• Get yourself a mentor.
• Be courageous in asking what you need and want. Push outside of your comfort zone! No one is going to fight your corner as much as you can.
• Keep learning and invest in your personal development, it will reward you both in personal and professional life.
• More females tend to suffer with confidence issues and have a bigger lack of self-belief. Face your fears, practice makes progress, believe me!

What can women do to achieve more prominent, leadership roles within their organisation?
One strategy to help women achieve more prominent roles in an organisation is having the self-belief and confidence that you can fulfil the job role (e.g. if going for a promotion). You don’t have to know how to do it 100% before you apply, but you do have to go armed with the right attitude, desire, work ethic, discipline and values. These are far greater attributes than skills alone and women sell themselves short.
Take the bold action first and you will figure out a way to make it work. Believe in yourself. Confidence is a skill, and it needs to be practiced regularly. Courage comes before confidence.
I would also encourage women to get themselves a mentor or a coach. They can support you, advice you and hold you accountable.

What can AGS Members do to address the gender imbalance and increase minority ethnic engineers within their organisations?
I think there is some momentum from businesses addressing gender and ethnic minority imbalance, but I also think more can and should be done.
We need to collaborate and get more intentional and at grassroot levels, going into schools, universities and communities, and talking to families and young girls from underrepresented groups.
The industry is not visible enough to young people, they don’t realise all these careers exist. There is a huge piece of work around awareness and AGS members can help with this on a local level where they operate.

Female role models already in the industry need a bigger platform, to increase the reach of their messages.

Finally, we need the men to join us, to be our genuine allies, to rally and advocate for us, to support our cause, because Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is better for society, for our planet and for business.

What changes would you like to see implemented in the geotechnical industry?
It would be brilliant to see industry taking the lead and developing a series of initiatives to bring awareness of geoscience careers to young people in schools, from Primary age children, all the way through to 18 years of age.
If we are to sustain a healthy pipeline of geoscientists coming into the industry and increasing the number of women and ethnic minority groups, it starts with investing our time and energy educating and inspiring young minds.