Picture a school hall full of 14-year-olds who've just been told that a career in tech means sitting alone in a dark basement, hunched over a black screen full of green text. Now picture Tori Tompkins, our Principal AI Consultant telling them about the time she went down an internal office slide, the kind that runs from the third floor to the first on her very first day of an internship, in a nylon skirt.
"It wasn't my most dignified start," she laughs. But it makes the point better than any statistic could: the image most young people carry of a life in technology is almost entirely wrong. And someone has to be in the room to tell them that.
For Tori, that someone has been her, for the best part of five years now, first as a lone volunteer visiting schools on her own time, and today as a trustee of Girls in Data, the organisation she helped build alongside fellow Trustees with the support of Women in Data®.
The story doesn't start with a mentor. It starts with the absence of one.
Tori joined her first employer straight out of university; a consultancy she'd been excited to start her career at. It didn't take long to notice the pattern that had followed her all the way from school.
"Out of 40 consultants that they had in the UK, I was the only woman. I think I'd had in my head that it was going to be so much better when I got into industry."
It wasn't the first time she'd been the only girl in the room. She'd picked ICT at GCSE and computing at college already in the minority, something she describes as almost accidental - "I recall someone pushing me into it kind of last minute. And that kind of set me on the trajectory that I'm on now."
That's the detail to focus on: the entire arc of her career traces back to one person, at one moment, nudging her toward a subject she might otherwise have opted out of. She didn't fully understand the significance of that nudge until years later. But it planted something. Frustration, mostly at first and then, slowly, purpose.
"I think I just kind of channelled that frustration," she says. "I knew, just from things you hear, that this kind of starts at school."
So she started doing something about it. On her own, initially, with no organisation behind her. She began going into local schools before students picked their GCSEs, running sessions on Scratch (the drag-and-drop coding language) and BBC micro:bits, the small programmable devices with LEDs that make code feel tangible for a 14-year-old.
Around four or five years ago, that solo effort found a home. Tori got a call from Roisin McCarthy, Founder of Women in Data®, who'd heard what she was doing independently.
"She said, 'You know what, this sounds exactly like the sort of thing we want to start doing at Girls in Data,” Tori recalls. Girls in Data was still in its early stages at the time, but they shared the same aspiration: to inspire more young women to see a future for themselves in STEM and data.
The sessions Tori built were put under the Girls in Data name. For Tori, it was never about who had the credit for it. She knew that with the backing of the Women in Data® the resources could have a much larger impact than she could ever do on her own.
It was an act of generosity that multiplied rather than diminished her impact. Girls in Data has since become its own registered charity and is described affectionately as Women in Data® ‘little sister’ where Tori sits on its board of four trustees. The two organisations stay close, if formally separate: Women in Data® helps recruit volunteers and gives community promotion around the importance of the Girls in Data initiative. Girls in Data delivers on the ground, in classrooms, in the moments that shift how a teenager sees themselves.
Ask Tori why walking into a classroom matters as much as what she teaches once she's there, and the answer isn't really about curriculum at all.
"The main importance of it was that it was me going into schools, doing it as a woman," she says. "It's very likely that's the first time they'd ever heard a woman talk about technology and coding, because the people you typically see in the media are the names we all know including Steve Jobs and Elon Musk”.
It's a simple but easy-to-miss truth: representation isn't a nice-to-have layered on top of good teaching. For many of the girls in her sessions, it is the lesson. Seeing a woman speak fluently and confidently about a career in data, in person, does something that no poster campaign or careers-fair leaflet can.
"I learned the importance of being a role model," she says and it's telling that even she describes this realisation as something that crept up on her, not something she set out chasing. Good mentorship rarely starts with a grand plan. It starts with someone noticing a gap and quietly deciding to stand in it.
The sessions themselves sit deliberately between technical skill-building and myth-busting. Early lessons on Scratch and micro:bits have evolved as the technology familiar to teenagers has changed but the opening pitch has stayed constant.
Girls in Data encourages every session to start in the same way: naming the stereotypes out loud before dismantling them. You've probably heard you need to be brilliant at maths to code. Tori wasn't, particularly, at school.
"It's more of a focus on building up confidence around coding, and showing how fun it can be, rather than explicitly teaching it," she explains.
That order of operations matters. Confidence has to come first, because a student who has already decided "this isn't for people like me" won't retain a single line of syntax. Once that barrier softens, the technical content lands very differently.
Girls in Data doesn't have neat impact dashboards to show for its work. Safeguarding rules make it impossible to track individual girls through school and into their careers, and Tori is candid about that gap. But she does the next best thing: she follows up.
"What I try to do and what I try to encourage others to do is follow up 6 months later, send an email to the computing teacher and ask what their uptake was."
One reply has stayed with her. A school near her old office had typically seen two or three girls choose computing at GCSE each year. The year after her session, six signed up. Double.
"I don't want to take all the credit for that," she says, ever careful not to overstate it. "It could also be that AI and data is so much louder than it has ever been before. But I take that as a personal victory."
That's the multiplier effect in miniature: one person, giving up evenings and weekends to stand in front of a classroom, and four extra fourteen-year-olds deciding a subject is for them after all. Multiply that across every school she's visited, every volunteer she's since recruited and trained, and every trustee meeting where Girls in Data plans its next term of sessions, and a single act of frustration-turned-generosity becomes an entire pipeline of future talent.
None of this scales on goodwill alone. What turned Tori’s solo school visits into a sustained, national programme was a partnership with Women in Data® providing the infrastructure, the recruitment reach, the annual conference platform, and the credibility that comes from an established community standing behind a new idea.
The partnership is close: shared events, shared advocacy, shared belief that representation in Data & AI has to start long before anyone's filling out a graduate application.
That's the model this series exists to spotlight. That lasting change in who enters our industry rarely comes from a single big initiative. It comes from communities like Women in Data® creating the scaffolding - the networks, the platforms, the introductions that let individual acts of mentorship reach far beyond what any one person could manage alone.
Girls in Data now takes up a significant share of Tori’s time outside her day job - organising volunteers, and training other mentors.
Her advice to the next generation of girls weighing up a GCSE option or a degree choice is really an extension of what she says in every session she runs: you don't need to be "a maths person." You don't need to have already decided you're technical. You just need someone to show you it's possible and then to see whether it clicks.
Her advice to anyone considering becoming a mentor themselves is quieter, but just as clear: you don't need permission to start. She didn't have an organisation, a title, or a plan when she began she had a Tuesday afternoon free and a memory of being the only woman in the room. Everything else was built afterwards, with people like Roisin McCarthy, Ella Ovenden, Jenny Wilkins and Lindsay Pellow and the wider Women in Data® community. Ready to take it further than she could alone, the charity has progressed from just 4 volunteers to 17 core volunteers working across the curriculum, website and social media.
"It was never about who had the credit for it," she says. It's a small sentence that says a great deal about why this work quietly, classroom by classroom keeps changing who pictures themselves in a Data & AI career next.
Check out this page for more details on how to get involved with Girls in Data.
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This story features part of ‘Inspiring the Next Generation of Data & AI Talent’, a content series from Advancing Analytics, in partnership with Women in Data®.