by Angela Guess
Jessica Davis recently wrote in InformationWeek, “Women made up 27% of people employed in computer and mathematical occupations in 1960. But instead of growing over several decades, as many more women participated in the workforce overall, that number had declined to 26% by 2013, according to a 2015 analysis of US Census data performed by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Karen Ebert Matthys cited that data during a talk at the Women in Big Data lunch at Strata + Hadoop World at the end of March. Matthys is executive director for external partners at the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), which sponsors the Women in Data Science Conference, first held in November 2015 with 23 speakers — all women — and 400 attendees.”
Davis continues, “There are a number of successful, prominent women who aspiring data scientists can look to for inspiration. Here’s a collection of a few who spoke at the Strata + Hadoop Women in Big Data lunch and at Stanford’s Women in Data Science conference in November… Jill Dyche: VP SAS Best Practices at SAS Institute. Dyche was a principal at a management consulting firm, Baseline Consulting Group, which was acquired by analytics leader SAS in 2012. She’s the author of several books, including the most recent one, The New IT: How Technology Leaders Are Enabling Business Strategy in the Digital Age.”
She goes on, “Yanbing Li: VP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware. Though not strictly a big data pro, Yanbing Li spoke during the Women in Big Data lunch about focus and career goals — and about how she made adjustments to the roles she pursued within VMware to put her on a path to her larger strategic goal of becoming the CEO of a large company. ‘We need to be very conscious of not always resorting to the path of least resistance,’ she told attendees at the lunch. The new path you choose to achieve your goal may not be an easy one. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. ‘Having a clear goal gives me a lot of strength to choose this hard path’.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ miriampastor