The Data Scientists making an invisible world visible to a new generation

Hannah Alexander and Lila Rose who work at Leonardo’s Bristol site in its cyber and security business, want to attract more young people and particularly girls into cyber and data careers, since women are still underrepresented in this field.

Recent research into the UK cyber security labour market, carried out on behalf of the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, confirms that while the number of women working in cybersecurity has increased from 6,800 in 2021 to 11,400 in 2024, just 17% of the cyber workforce is female.

Both Hannah and Lila are keenly aware of this imbalance in the industry, so they created a special workshop for a group of girls at Rednock School in Bristol.

Lead Data Scientist and Capability Development Lead Lila said: “In my previous job I helped to gather qualitative research into the gender gap, in collaboration with the Scottish Government. The figures are still similar, so the dial isn’t shifting quickly enough. We feel really lucky that we ended up in this profession, because we never actually planned it.

“I think a lot of that is because we’d never had role models or seen people like us do it. This workshop introduced the girls to the technology, but also helped them see two women working in cyber – you have to see it to believe it.”

Chat GPT, language apps and Netflix are just a few examples of the invisible influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in our daily lives. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn patterns and trends in data. Over time, it learns people’s preferences, behaviours and needs so it can predict their requirements, offering suggestions.

The students learned how to apply machine learning by creating a music app that could understand and then predict users’ requirements.

Over the course of the workshop, the girls did data analysis and machine learning to build an application that would suggest which genre of music to listen to according to the time of day. The suggestions were drawn from the individual’s past behaviours and preferences. By the end of the workshop, the girls were able to innovate special features such as their top ten artists or their most listened to genres.

Hannah attended Bath University before becoming a Senior Data Scientist at Leonardo’s Bristol site in its cyber and security business. She believes that if girls knew more about data careers earlier on, they could avoid the often-circuitous path that women complete before pursuing careers in the field.

She said: “At university I only discovered coding by chance, but that was what really captured my imagination. I had never considered if before as I’d assumed it would be too hard. I think that is quite a common deterrent, particularly among women.

“We wanted to create a workshop that the girls could relate to and that played a big role in removing those barriers to understanding as they’d already used music apps. We just built on their existing knowledge and encouraged them to direct and shape the technology themselves. We’re hopefully not just making the invisible world of AI visible, we’re also increasing the visibility of careers for women in tech.”

Leonardo UK’s cyber security business provides technology and services to organisations such as the emergency services, critical national infrastructure, large enterprises, government and international agencies.

A recent independent report conducted by Oxford Economics confirmed that Leonardo UK’s cyber security business carried over £1.3 million in R&D in 2023, an annual figure that has steadily grown from just under £0.4 million in 2018.