EY unlocks gender diversity insights with The Data City

EY is one of the UK’s leading professional services firms, working with clients across sectors such as financial services, technology, healthcare, and public sector organisations.  

Female Founders Insight Series led by Lynn Rattigan in collaboration with Panintellgience, focused on understanding gender diversity in business leadership, specifically identifying female-founded companies. The report posed significant data challenges, but The Data City provided the essential tools and datasets that enabled EY to complete their research with efficiency and accuracy. 

Before discovering The Data City, EY had explored various other data platforms, but they often fell short, either in the scope of data or the ability to deliver actionable insights quickly.  

EY’s project aimed to answer a precise question: Which companies were founded by women, men, or mixed-gender teams? Existing platforms provided partial data but lacked the level of detail necessary to make confident decisions. Their previous data subscription only addressed part of the problem, leaving gaps in understanding ownership and control structures. 

One of the major hurdles was manually identifying the founders’ gender based on directors or persons of significant control. This laborious process was time-consuming and prone to error, with no guarantee of full accuracy. EY required a solution that could speed up the discovery process while offering more reliable and up to date data. 

The Data City platform became an indispensable tool for EY’s project by offering a more robust dataset that covered detailed company information.  

In addition to improved data quality, The Data City provided powerful functionality that streamlined EY’s research process. The platform’s ease of use allowed the EY team to filter companies based on founder gender. EY could now perform more refined searches and gain deeper insights into gender diversity. 

The collaboration with The Data City proved crucial to the success of EY’s report. Approximately 75% of the final output was directly supported by data sourced from The Data City. The platform not only solved the original challenge of identifying female-founded companies but also offered additional insights that EY had not anticipated. This enriched the final report, providing a comprehensive view of gender diversity in business leadership across the UK. 

EY’s team found The Data City’s user-friendly interface and high-level data analysis capabilities to be instrumental in completing their project efficiently. The tool allowed them to move quickly between different stages of analysis, enhancing productivity and enabling deeper insights into gender-related business data.