Six figure compensation payout in sexist Will claim

A farmer's daughter has won a £650,000 payout after claiming sexism resulted in her brothers being favoured in her father's will.

Julie Mate and her sisters were left £12,000 each after their father, Donald Mate, died in 1992. He bequeathed his share of the farm to her brothers, Andrew and Robert, and his wife Shirley, who later also handed her portion to her sons.

62-year-old Ms Mate claimed she had sacrificed school and her social life as a child to work alongside her brothers on the family's 140-acre West Yorkshire dairy farm. She went to study animal science at university and, following her studies, she had wanted to return to work full-time but her brothers had told her: "You're not coming back."

She has now won a £652,000 payout from her brothers' fortune after a High Court judge found it was her work that led to part of the land increasing in value from £300,000.00 to £9 million.

A few years after her father died, Ms Mate claimed that she started to look into ways of making money from the land in order to realise gains in which she and her sisters could also share. She said that she had been encouraged by her mother, Shirley, to look into the potential for redevelopment of 40 acres of farmland - known as Netherton Moor.

The land was ultimately included in the council's local plan in 2015, but Ms Mate later discovered that her mother and brothers had already agreed a £9 million sale to developers Persimmon Homes to build a 250-house estate - without informing her.

Judge Andrew Sutcliffe KC said the brothers had been "unjustly enriched" by Ms Mate's years of work in having the land removed from the green belt so that it could be sold to developers to build a 250-house estate, and that it was right she should share in the windfall.

The judge ruled in her favour on a point of "unjust enrichment", accepting her evidence that "at no time did she tell either of her brothers or Shirley that she would work on this project for nothing, without expectation of any reward".

He awarded her a payment of £652,000 from her brothers, representing a 7.5 per cent share of the uplift in the land from its original value.