Miranda McKie advocates for diversity and inclusion by breaking down barriers for women inside and outside of her organization. As a manager of Data Architecture and Engineering, Miranda is an expert in advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. She has strategically used these technologies to build new ways of addressing inclusion challenges, creating an advanced analytics system to understand gaps in the organization’s inclusion and diversity efforts and bolster opportunities for women.

Miranda’s most recognized strength is her ability to build relationships and rally people for a common cause; over the course of her young career at Accenture, she has played a leadership role in pitching new ideas and gaining commitment from colleagues to sponsor new programs related to workplace inclusion. She is a trailblazer on the rise.

How She Made Change

Miranda took on the role of People Analytics Lead in addition to her roles in Applied Sciences after proposing an Inclusion and Diversity Advanced Analytics project. Miranda recruited several stakeholders across departments including HR, Legal, Data Privacy, and the Women’s ERG committee to support her new program, which allowed for deeper analysis into the barriers employees face in the workplace. The Inclusion and Diversity team drew from evidence-based insights to better understand historical patterns and identify opportunities for enhanced inclusion and diversity programs and planning. To ensure this project’s continued success, Miranda established a steering committee of project sponsors staffed with six leaders across Accenture—demonstrating her ability to garner leadership support in advancing inclusion and diversity efforts.

In addition to her data analytics work, Miranda is always looking for ways to promote nontraditional opportunities for women at the organization. While successfully spearheading a complex data architecture and integration project, Miranda focused on ensuring women were well represented on her seven-person team. In fact, this was one of the first times in Canada that, from analyst to manager, all the employees on an Accenture project of this magnitude were women.

Miranda has also contributed to the growth of a pipeline of women analysts and data strategists. She did this by training and mentoring women analysts at the organization and helping to identify staffing and growth opportunities, enhancing Accenture’s ability to recruit and develop women.

Finally, while working on a critical project for a university, Miranda was tasked with creating a master student dataset to enable machine learning to cluster students in distinct segments. As a result, the university was positioned to “encourage and support young women to take up STEM subjects and become future leaders,” and Miranda and her team were chosen as finalists for Accenture’s internal global Inclusion and Diversity Excellence Award.

Inclusive Leadership

Miranda exemplifies allyship in all that she does, especially in her commitment to creating opportunities for women within the organization and her volunteer efforts to support and build a pipeline of women in STEM. Through her pro bono work, Miranda has promoted women in STEM using data-driven guidance; uncovered mental health insights using natural language processing; enhanced our understanding of homeless youth segments using unsupervised machine learning; and used inclusion and diversity analytics to promote classical music among underrepresented youths.

About Miranda McKie

Miranda McKie started her career at Accenture three years ago. She has two roles within Applied Intelligence: Data Architecture and Engineering Manager and, more recently, People Analytics Lead. Miranda is a passionate, open-minded, and empathetic leader who has continuously striven to foster positive change within Accenture and Canada’s greater corporate culture. Her efforts have succeeded in providing greater opportunities for women in the corporate world–and in particular, those in STEM.