Females in science and technologies fields have always less been than optimum. In an era when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law and business, why are there so few women scientists and engineers? Columbus CEO brought this interesting topic to our attention in their article, “Women in Analytics brings women’s voices into industry conversation.”
In 2016, Rehgan Avon was still a student at Ohio State University when she noticed that even though she had lots of women peers in her chosen career field of data analytics, there weren’t a lot of them in leading roles at the conferences she had been attending. Not surprisingly, she decided to look into the data.
“It’s very interesting because there are studies that show women make up about 50 percent of statisticians,” Avon says. “They’re pretty predominant in the field. But if you look across conferences in the United States at how many had women speakers, you’re looking at worst at 2 percent and at best 26 percent representation from women.”
Avon decided to change that data and got to work on her own conference. How would this play out for other STEM fields? How can women take the proverbial “bull by the horn”?
Melody K. Smith
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