Opinion
Women in Data Science Are Invisible. We Can Change That.
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So here is the conundrum faced by women in male dominated-businesses: How do we make a mark for our ability and not just for the fact that we are female?
By Claudia Perlich
I have to admit that I never really gave the number of women in data science much thought until recently. Maybe it was because, by some lucky accident, my NYU faculty advisor’s two other PhD students also happened to be female. And about half of my predictive modeling group peers at IBM Research were female. And half of the PhDs here at Dstillery are female.
Or maybe because in the bigger picture, having spent the better part of 15 years in computer science departments, research labs, and weight rooms, being around mostly men seemed perfectly normal—in fact, expected. I didn’t stop to consider the “why.”
But then about one year ago I was asked to be the general co-chair of one of the biggest and most well-established data science conferences in the world: SIGKDD 2014 (KDD). I was the only woman on the committee. It became clear that the decision to select me was in no small part driven by my being a woman. On the one hand, I was pleased that meant that some men take the matter of gender equality seriously, but on the other, I felt cheated because I can never be sure whether I truly earned it.
Read full article as published in WIRED
Or maybe because in the bigger picture, having spent the better part of 15 years in computer science departments, research labs, and weight rooms, being around mostly men seemed perfectly normal—in fact, expected. I didn’t stop to consider the “why.”
But then about one year ago I was asked to be the general co-chair of one of the biggest and most well-established data science conferences in the world: SIGKDD 2014 (KDD). I was the only woman on the committee. It became clear that the decision to select me was in no small part driven by my being a woman. On the one hand, I was pleased that meant that some men take the matter of gender equality seriously, but on the other, I felt cheated because I can never be sure whether I truly earned it.
Read full article as published in WIRED