Describe your career to date
As the Deputy Director for Data, Insights, and Fraud at the Government Digital Service, I am responsible for creating and delivering the department’s data strategy, for implementing our performance analysis and fraud detection capability on the GOV.UK One Login infrastructure, as well as leading multi-disciplinary teams of data and non-data professionals. The aim is to become a truly data-driven department, delivering public services that are underpinned by the wealth of data that the government holds on citizens.
I am currently responsible for a number of teams totalling around eighty people, with skills ranging from data science, analytics, user research, fraud analysis, and software development. The teams are focused on building the performance analysis and fraud detection capability for the GOV.UK One Login programme, which will provide a single mechanism for citizens to prove and reuse their identity credentials when accessing all central government services.
Being positioned at the centre of government, allows me to drive data best-practice across multiple departments and ensure that data is being used to solve major challenges for both government departments and citizens alike. Examples of this work include driving the mass migration from Google’s Universal Analytics to the new GA4, implementing a single data environment that will allow government departments to better understand the journeys that citizens are taking across the government digital estate, and creating a consistent and user-friendly way for citizens to prove their identity.
I am also Research Director and Board member for the non-profit, Women in Identity. I coordinate the research efforts for the organisation, which centre on diversity and inclusion in the identity sector. I am currently working with partners to create a Code of Conduct for the digital identity industry, to ensure that the bias that exists in datasets (and is so often exacerbated by technology) does not exclude people from accessing services. This topic of inclusion (and how it can be supported through data) is a particular focus of governments as they look to leverage the opportunity of digital identity, and I have had the opportunity to work with the DCMS in the UK on their trust framework, as well as providing expert testimony to US Congress on the need to mandate inclusion in identity systems.
Beyond my professional commitments, I am a passionate advocate for widening participation in data fields, particularly for under-represented groups. In my role as a tutor with the Access Project, I work with young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds to increase their chances of getting into top universities. This gives me a great opportunity to show my students the broad range of academic routes into data fields, and the vast careers options available. I also volunteer as a mentor with the non-profit Black in Data, supporting people of colour at the early stages of their careers. I was also recently named as a governor at Withington Girls School (my alma mater), where I am focusing on creating a digital and data curriculum for the school, ensuring that pupils have the appropriate skills to take on data and technology roles in the future.
In 2019 I was selected as one of the Twenty Women in Data; this was the start of an ongoing relationship with the Women in Data team which allowed me to become an advocate for and champion of increasing the numbers of women in data roles.
In 2023, I was honoured to be selected as one of the DataIQ Top 100. This recognition has helped to boost my profile as a data leader both internally in GDS and in the external data market as well.
