Sophie started her career working on an IT service desk and followed a technical path as an infrastructure and telephony engineer until becoming a service desk manager. She followed a service management path, ending in being the head of service management and, unofficially, a deputy chief information officer (CIO) in the financial sector. Her experience is from nearly 25 years of working in a male-dominated environment. For years, women have been labelled: too emotional, too dramatic, too much. Like many women, Sophie’s felt the weight of the stereotypes that try to shrink us: the idea that we’re less logical, more reactive, harder to lead, and so on. She’s spent her life pushing back on those. Her role became redundant in early 2022 and she took a leap of faith, backing herself to start her own consultancy business, Lapis Consulting Services Ltd. The company is in its fourth year of trading. Sophie has been a mentor for the majority of her career and volunteers as a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) ambassador.