The civil service. The Royal Air Force. Deloitte. None of these institutions were designed with a working-class Sikh woman in mind. I went in anyway — and I stayed, and I rose, and I paid attention to why so few people who looked like me were doing the same.

So I did something about it — I researched it.

For my master's in Strategic Human Resource Management, I studied a question most organisations prefer to leave unexamined: why don't ethnic minority women progress into senior leadership at the same pace as everyone else? I spent a year inside the Ministry of Defence — at the time the least representative department in the Civil Service for gender and ethnic diversity at senior levels — gathering both the data and the lived experience.

I found four barriers: organisational structures, language, culture, and leadership — and I set out nine things an organisation could actually do about them. That research has never been published. This site is its first home.

Now I'm helping build the workforce behind Britain's space ambition.

Today I work at Deloitte UK in Organisation and Workforce Transformation, increasingly focused on the air and space sector — the question of who builds, launches, and leads the capability this country is betting on. One Deloitte partner called me the firm's first "space woman." I'll take it.

I don't work alone, and I don't believe the hardest problems get solved in silos. I convene a cross-sector group that brings theMinistry of Defence, Babcock, Rolls-Royce and Leonardoaround the same table to tackle the skills shortages none of them can fix on their own. I helped Defence Digital stand up a community of practice so hard-won knowledge gets shared, not hoarded. I spent time with Deloitte US in Washington and at the Space Symposium in Colorado, and I brought what I learned home.

What I stand for

Representation at the top isn't a nice-to-have — in a sector racing to build capability, it's a performance question. The people who get to lead shape what gets built. I write here about the space sector, women in leadership, and what it takes to build teams that perform where it genuinely matters. If that's your world — or the world you're heading into — you're in the right place.

— Balvinder Kaur