Lessons from two leading ladies of data

If we look at data and analytics practitioners as falling into the realm of IT and telecommunications professionals, data has a big gender problem. Between April and June 2016, according to data from the ONS, approximately for every two women in the industry, there were eleven men, or 173,000 to 777,000 to be precise.

Within the context of this woeful under-representation, DataIQ invited two data industry veterans to share their experiences as women in the industry on stage at the DataIQ Summit 2017 last week. Robbie Burgess, global data privacy programme manager at RELX entered the industry during her placement year at university, working for a large oil company, manipulating and making sense of sales figures. 

“It wasn’t called data then. It was reporting and analysis,” she explained. She managed to land the job despite an error of judgement in the interview. When asked what her ideal job would be, she responded that she wanted to be in the SAS so that she could abseil down the side of a building and storm an embassy, all while wearing black.

Fedelma Good, director of information policy and strategy at Barclays, on the other hand, started in data by loading punch cards as a junior programmer at the Bank of Ireland. “We were given the scripts for the current accounts, then the scripts for the loans, then scripts for the mortgages and we were repeatedly creating records for customers,” she recalled.

When Good’s suggestion that she get involved in the process design to avoid repetition was brushed off, she quickly left the bank and went to an insurance company. There she “hooked up, very luckily,” with the marketing director and together they implemented the first touch-sensitive quotation system for insurance products in Europe.

Good currently works for Barclays and recently announced that her team would be focusing on information governance and strategy, rather than simply policy and control. Burgess at present leads the GDPR compliance programme for RELX Group. Both had many positive things to say about working in the data industry. 

According to Burgess, the demands of the sector are “as broad as medicine” and it requires workers that have a wide range of talents. “It draws on many skills. You need to be a really good communicator, you need to be very logical, [so] there are opportunities whatever your background.”

Burgess also said that people expect women to be good at multi-tasking, which is a great asset in the data industry where you have got to understand more than one thing. She said: “You’ve got to be able to bring things together, such as bringing the business and the data together. You’ve got to be technical enough to understand, but at the same time have good enough communication skills to be able to paint a picture.”

Good highlighted flexible working as an advantage the data industry has over others. “I think data is a fantastic opportunity for flexibility because it can be done anywhere – with the capabilities we have of working remotely, it can be done at 10 o’clock at night if that suits someone,” she said.

Working in a male-dominated industry has led to both Burgess and Good being mis-gendered, with correspondence often being addressed to Mr Burgess and Mr Good.