Mandy Hickson: It’s about personality not gender

"I think the strange perception for a lot of people is that if you’re going into a male environment you must try and be a man and  I certainly never did that, I think it’s really important to try and obtain your femininity and be true to yourself and I did have one very, very funny story when I was on an exercise in Las Vegas as it happens, it’s a pucker exercise it’s not one that we made up, and we’d all got a bit done up, put our glad rags on to go out for a really nice evening and I swung down the stairs and I had a lovely French navigator and he said Mandy you’re looking beautiful this evening, and the guy next to him said, you can’t say that to Mandy she’s one of the guys and he said you have a lot to learn about women.  But actually it was true they saw me as being one of the guys and I very much realized that it’s not about gender, it’s about personalities and I always get asked, was it very hard working in such a gender specific environment, actually it wasn’t because I had some great friends, and that’s the important thing it’s the people that you’re working with not their sex."