Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, PICTFOR Co-Chair, welcomed the group. She emphasised the importance of hearing from those in the room about the subject of Diversity in the Tech Industry. She acknowledged that digital skills would become vital as technology becomes the bedrock of our economy and emphasised the importance of avoiding leaving any individual or community behind.
Dame Caroline Dinenage MP then introduced Victoria Collins MP, the Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology. Victoria Collins MP discussed the many diverse people who inspired her to start her own business as a tech entrepreneur, including her own mother, who started her own website 20 years ago after coming to the UK from Malaysia.
She spoke of her experiences as a journalist at Forbes, interviewing female leaders in the tech industry, and told the audience how this helped to inspire her in her own career. She explained how important it was to see leaders from such a diversity of backgrounds, especially as almost half of women in tech cited a lack of mentor, or female role model as a barrier to their success.
She told the audience of her ambition for the industry to be diverse by design and therefore safe by design. She added that it is important to have the right people in the room and leading, in order to create the greatest products. What is good for tech, she said, is good for society, and therefore good for business.
Finally, she emphasised the role that policy makers can play in creating and maintaining programmes such as mentorship, education or funding to help bring inspiring and innovative people into the industry
The next speaker, Science, Innovation and Technology, Select Committee Chair Chi Onwurah MP, spoke of her engineering background and her own engineering role model, her mother, who was not an engineer, but insisted that her daughter could be anything she wanted to be despite the lack of role models visible to her.
She spoke of her passion for diversity in the sector and her frustration at the appearance of a backwards progression in diversity in the sector – citing the fact that less of 16% of engineers are women. She cited progress that has been made through the introduction of flexible working policies and continuous education to support women from the existing workforce into tech.
She told the audience that she was emboldened to see so many new MPs with a science, engineering, or technical background. She added that this presented an opportunity to address the lack of diversity in technology imminently. She highlighted the success of recent campaigns such as InvestHER as motivation that pressure on policy makers can have positive outcomes.
She finished by emphasising that diverse outcomes only come from things that are diverse by design, expanding that if those who design and develop new tech are not diverse, then the technology itself will not represent humanity.
Yasmina Kone, Tech for Good, started by describing her career opening access to opportunities by using Tech. She told the audience that unlocking diversity as a catalyst for innovation and growth was essential.
She then offered three calls to action to advance inclusion efforts in the sector, including:
1. Strengthening inclusive recruitment pipelines by actively inviting in underrepresented groups and providing free training that creates pathways into tech.
2. Empowering those already in the industry by investing in mentorship, upskilling, and clear development pathways to retain and elevate diverse talent.
3. Holding ourselves accountable to creating environments where everyone can thrive at work and feel included.
Emma Wright, Partner at Harbottle & Lewis, then highlighted her main takeaways from the day’s event – firstly, that there were so many new parliamentarians engaged with PICTFOR, who can work with the industry to ensure they are focused on the right issues. Secondly, she called on industry to ensure parliamentarians are provided with the right solutions about how we can create and implement effective policies. She encouraged productive collaboration.
Lavinia Osbourne, Founder of Women in Blockchain Talks, began by discussing her work with the future of women in Blockchain, where she highlighted how blockchain will define how we engage with each other as a society in the future. She continued by affirming that in order to ensure diversity and inclusion in the industry, we must lead from the front and spotlight the women who are already doing this. She highlighted the need for better funding in grassroots communities for STEMM education.
Ren Hooi, Founder of Lightning Reach, began by discussing her own background as a female immigrant founder, facing systemic challenges in the industry. She set out three layers to tackle barriers to DEI in the industry. Firstly, she described that the core layer requires us to consider the make-up of the team – how can we hire and retain a diverse pipeline of talent, and how we can help them to grow. She indicated that the second layer requires us to consider who we serve. She stressed the importance of designing a product alongside those who have lived experience of the problem that the product aims to tackle. She noted that the final layer requires us to consider who is in the broader ecosystem – be that investors, partners, or policymakers – and how we can work with them.
Ieva Jankelaityte, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead at Tata Consultancy Services, stressed that despite great strides made, achieving Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is still a difficult due to multiple challenges. Firstly, she highlighted educational disparity as a barrier, with individuals still lacking access to STEM opportunities which prevent them from entering the tech industry. To address this, she said, we must focus on investing in early talent, by enhancing digital skills in underserved communities through flexible and accessible programmes. She finished with a reminder that the tech field is constantly changing, with jobs constantly evolving and requiring technological skills to succeed in them. As a result, it is essential to ensure we support the next generation with the skills that they will need to succeed.
Tania Duarte, Founder of We and AI, began by discussing her background and work at We and AI, delivering programmes to ensure critical AI literacy. She discussed how projects ensuring that AI is exposed to a diverse range of people representative of society is essential to preventing discrimination from AI. She urged the audience to think about how they can challenge systems and incentives to move beyond tokenistic representation. She highlighted that the only way we can produce diverse, equitable workplaces is by ensuring tech companies are making diverse products and services. She encouraged the audience to not only think about giving people the skills to take part in the tech industry, but also to challenge and innovate within it.
Phil Benson, Co-Founder of UK Black Tech, expressed concerns about losing out on innovation by not harnessing homegrown talent. He advocated for viewing DEI as a vehicle for growth and innovation, rather than just viewing it as morally the right thing to do. He explained that the sector must move away from the analogue approach to recruitment and DEI and instead approach it in a way that is relevant to the dynamics of the technology industry. He finished by reiterating the importance of normalising representation as a tool for the success of the industry.
Lauren Ingram, Founder, Next Big Thing, spoke of her passion for bringing more women into emerging technologies. She told the audience of her concerns about AI and apathy accelerating challenges and disparities for DEI in technology, citing the fact that AI is impacting women’s jobs at a faster rate than men’s. She reflected on the introduction of new policies such as the ability to work from home, and the role these have had in encouraging diversity in the tech workforce. She emphasised that we need to be maintaining and developing policies that encourage diversity in the industry.
Erika Brodnock MBE, Co-Founder of Kinhub, spoke of her own challenges in the Tech industry, including raising capital as a black female founder of a tech startup. She added that there is still a huge £373bn gap of funding that could be allocated to black-owned startups, but they continue to outperform their peers by 61% over a three-year period. These statistics show that the opportunity for the industry is incredible.
Melissa Wills & Lydia Martelli-French, Co-Founders of Capgemini Invent, spoke of the importance of encouraging young people into the industry, by making it more interesting and compelling and by emphasising that members of the industry still drive value. They cited their own expertise in prioritising social value through technology and the positive effects this has had on their own workplaces.
Rachid Hourizi MBE, Director of the Insititute for Coding at the University of Bath, provided some encouragement to the audience, reminding them that the diversity being chased is possible, with his own organisation a perfect example – where 47% of engaged learners are women. He added that AI presents a challenge, by both making it harder to follow a traditional career path, and by limiting access to a technological career path, as a digital background becomes almost essential to engagement in the industry. Rachid encouraged introspection to discover what it is that we do not know about how we can involve a diverse group of people in the industry, and to speak to those that do.
Jessica Wade, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College London, opened by reminding the audience that academia should open doors, but so often the opportunities it presents is limited to so few. She encouraged more transparency with decision making in the industry. She added that the solution to underrepresentation is to inspire people into academia, but conceded that this can only be done when academia properly represents the diversity of society
Samantha Niblett MP, PICTFOR Co-Chair, complimented the passion for diversity in the room and encouraged attendees to come to parliamentarians with solutions rather than problems. She promised to ensure parliamentarians double down in their effort for diversity in the industry. She also called on attendees to provide data to parliamentarians to help them understand the problems and solutions, given that current datasets are so fragmented.