Why We’re Sponsoring Women in Data at Informatica World Tour
Every business has an origin story. Ours started in October 2011, when both Martyn and I had just been made redundant. What could have been a dead end turned into Cloud Perspective.
I set myself a challenge: 50 days, four Salesforce certifications. Martyn picked up a sales management role in electronics. Within three months, my workload in the Salesforce ecosystem, particularly around data, was already enough to pull him back in. And just like that, Cloud Perspective was born.
Fourteen Years On
Fast forward 14 years: ~150 projects delivered in Master Data Management, Integration, and Data Quality. Highs, lows, plenty of lessons. But one thing stands out:
👉The data industry still doesn’t look like the world outside.
Walk down any UK high street and you’ll see diversity everywhere, gender, ethnicity, background. Inside most data teams? Not so much.
Choosing to Do It Differently
From the start, we wanted Cloud Perspective to reflect the outside world. Not as a buzzword exercise, but because diverse teams solve better problems and build better solutions.
Has it been easy? No. We’ve had to balance ambition with the realities of employment law and the challenges of growing a small business. But the principle stuck: no bias in who we hire, promote, or support.
The State of Play in the UK Data Industry
The UK data and tech sector is booming, but the demographics still tell their own story:
- Gender: Women hold ~32% of tech roles overall¹, but only 27–29% in data-specific positions². Some areas are closer to balance (e.g. Marketing & Insight at 47% female), but in Data Tech it’s only 17%³.
- Ethnicity: About 27% of the UK AI workforce are from ethnic minority backgrounds⁴, yet 40% of firms say they have zero minority representation in their data teams⁵.
- Disability: 10% of the IT workforce reports a disability⁶, below the UK average of 14%. Data roles are even less clear, with patchy reporting⁷.
- Socioeconomic background: Just 9% of UK tech workers are from working-class origins⁸, compared to 29% in finance and 23% in law⁹.
- Leadership: Diversity drops sharply at senior levels. At the Alan Turing Institute, gender is balanced overall, but 68% of scientific leaders are male¹⁰. In algorithmic trading, only 9% of roles are held by women¹¹.
There’s progress, but not nearly enough.
What Needs to Change
If the data industry is serious about reflecting the society it serves, it needs to move past slogans. That means:
- Measuring and publishing demographic data consistently.
- Supporting career progression, not just entry-level recruitment.
- Tackling the socioeconomic gap through outreach and education.
- Leadership that acts, not just talks, on diversity.
This isn’t about “nice to have.” It’s about innovation, fairness, and trust. Data is built by people and if the people don’t reflect society, the outcomes won’t either.
Why We’re Sponsoring Women in Data
Today, Cloud Perspective is a boutique consultancy with 27 Informatica and Salesforce-trained consultants, roughly 50/50 male and female, with broader diversities represented.
We didn’t get here by chasing quotas. We got here by refusing to let bias make the choices.
But the wider industry still has work to do. Which is why we’re sponsoring Women in Data at the 2025 Informatica World Tour. It’s our way of helping move the needle, celebrating the women shaping the future of data and pushing for the industry to look more like the society it serves.
✨ Fourteen years on, we’re still the same business at heart: built on resilience, grounded in values, and determined to do our part in making data fairer, smarter, and more human.
Sources
¹ AIPRM – Women in Tech Statistics
² GOV.UK – Diversity in UK Tech
³ WeAreTechWomen – Gender Landscape in UK Tech
⁴ AIPRM – Women in STEM Statistics
⁵ GOV.UK – Understanding the AI Labour Market
⁶ IChemE – Data Science Skills in the UK Workforce
⁷ Wikipedia – Women in Data
⁸ GOV.UK – Women in Tech at DBT
⁹ IChemE – Social Mobility in Chemical Engineering
¹⁰ The Guardian – Alan Turing Institute Gender Balance
¹¹ Financial News London (specific article not available online)
