Building an Inclusive Competition: The 2025 UK Cyber Leaders Challenge DEI Report

One of our core values at the Cyber Leaders Challenge is building an inclusive cyber profession. We firmly believe that everyone should be given the opportunity to explore a career in cyber. By creating a diverse profession, our defences become stronger and we can keep pace with a rapidly changing threat landscape.

To measure the impact of our work, we collect optional & anonymised Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) data from our student competitors. Here are the results.

Through working with organisations such as CyberWomen Groups CIC, Women in CyberSecurity & others, we are proud that 45% of student competitors identified as female, showing a close to equal gender split. That’s compared to 17% of the UK cyber security industry (DSIT).

Following the trend of higher representation from minority groups than the indusutry average – 49% of 2025 competitors come from a minority ethnicity, 14% have a disability and 22% are neurodiverse.

These numbers are achieved through the support of our partners and an intentional promotion campaign that seeks to break down the barriers students may face to participation.

We encourage students from non-traditional cyber backgrounds to apply to the competition – primarily receiving applications from politics, international relations and criminology students alongside the computer scientists.

Beyond the major disciplines competing in the Cyber Leaders Challenge, we were pleased to see students studying subjects such as psychology, economics & chemistry competing.

With students hailing from a grand total of 44 different universities across the UK and 50% graduating this year, it’s a truly exciting time for the cyber security industry & the latest Cyber Leaders Challenge Alumni.

You can access the full report below. If you or your organisation would like to help support us in our mission to build an inclusive profession, please get in touch.