Diversity Across the UK's High-Growth Startups & Scaleups

Beauhurst has long believed in the importance of diversity—in all its forms—to the UK’s high-growth ecosystem. Diversity fuels growth and innovation. But we have historically been reticent about many forms of diversity. As a company that provides data and analysis, we have felt limited to speaking about issues where good data can be brought to bear. For this reason, we have regularly published research on the gender, age and nationality of founders, directors and employees at UK startups and scaleups.

But diversity is obviously broader than those three issues. Unfortunately, good data cannot be found or created on the many other areas of diversity where we know anecdotally and instinctively that there is under-representation. This is why you won’t have seen us put out much publicly on these areas. And we are not the only ones facing this problem, as much of the data around minorities is highly-protected under the GDPR.

These are the special category data: personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin; personal data revealing political opinions; personal data revealing religious or philosophical beliefs; personal data revealing trade union membership; genetic data; biometric data (where used for identification purposes); data concerning health; data concerning a person’s sex life; and data concerning a person’s sexual orientation. You can read more about special category data here. The strength of these rules will also be a stumbling block to any forthcoming solution.

In order for Beauhurst to more meaningfully address the issues of under-represented ethnicities, sexualities and other minorities in the UK’s high-growth ecosystem, we need better data. Recent successes on the gender equality issue, such as the creation of HMT’s Investing in Women code, started from good data. Once the scale of the problem was evidenced, the existence of the problem was undeniable and the nature of the correct interventions could start to be determined. The issues of diversity where we do have good data are populated, in large part, by data we get from Companies House, and I believe Companies House is the best mechanism by which to collect comprehensive data on other diversity issues.

We hope to lobby the UK Government to get Companies House to seek data on ethnicity, sexuality, and other diversity issues from directors. This will still only yield a partial dataset: directors will be able to opt-out and/or not make their answers public. But even where they don’t make the answers public (which means Beauhurst won’t be able to use the data), I hope Companies House (or ONS) would be able to produce summary statistics.

Imperfect data should not stop us, or others, from presenting and analysing the issues of diversity in the UK’s business landscape. For this reason, we’re compiling this hub of known publications and resources on any aspect of diversity that’s available. Some of these we have contributed data to, while others are the exclusive work of others that we wish to amplify.

If you know of any research that you think should be included here, or would like to request data for research you’re conducting, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Henry Whorwood, Head of Research & Consultancy