May, meanwhile, tried hard to improve her prospects from inside the organisation. “I'm an optimist,” she says. “I thought I could find a way up through the ranks to somewhere else within the organisation where I could use my talents and skills.” She and her colleagues worked together to implement new training programmes which, she says, had an impact. “We had a huge amount of success, but our reward for that was having it taken off us and given to someone else.”
