Fourteen years ago, I started Gateway Women, and through it, I've healed my childless heart--and it’s been the honour of my life to help so many others do the same. Now in my early sixties, my life is full and busy as I mentor the rising generation of childless advocates as they step into their power, work on two new books and develop resources and community for those of us ageing without children.

An author, speaker, systems thinker, community builder and integrative psychotherapist, Jody’s known for her best-selling Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (PanMac 2016/2020) and her TEDx talk ‘The Lost Tribe of Childless Women‘, which has been watched more than 200,000 times. These days, she is focused on the challenges and adventures of elderhood without motherhood and, as well as the ‘Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen’ webinars, which have been running for five years now, she’s co-creating an Alterkin (Alternative Kinship) Circle for those ageing without children in her rural Irish location, and writing about it as it develops on her bestselling Substack, ‘Gateway Elderwomen.’

Jody’s been a World Childless Week supporter and Ambassador since the beginning, was a founding and former board member at the UK Charity Ageing Without Children, and is a former Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. In 2025, she qualified as a Work That Reconnects Facilitator and plans to weave its earth-based wisdom through her future workshops for older childless women. After a lifetime in London, she now lives in a tiny hamlet on the coast of West Cork, Ireland, and when she’s not reading, writing, or learning to grow vegetables, she’s to be found wrangling a delightful scamp of a puppy called Puffin and caring for Pushkin the cat, an exceptionally patient old Ginger Gentleman.