Most of you know our fearless CEO and Founder, Anna Anisin. And if you haven’t yet read her article in Forbes about her own career path and lessons she has learned from them, drop what you’re doing and give it a look. It’s hard to believe that such a pioneer in the data space still sometimes feels silenced or undermined by her male colleagues. But that’s why she started this community for us. Anna described feeling like she to strive for a higher standard than her male counterparts merely on the account of being female. When responding to the common idea that women have to prove themselves worthy of being in the industry, Anna states that women are highly capable of doing the same work. By adding some strong female intuition to the data science world, we are undoubtedly improving the scope of the industry.

Marching towards career success

By popular demand, this month’s theme is Career Paths. Though everyone’s journey is different, we can learn from each other’s stories and find support and inspiration in their challenges and successes. There’s the compelling story of how Alexandra Cavoulacos left a management position at McKinsey & Company to co-found acclaimed career website “The Muse” with a little help from female mentors and empowering books. Then there’s Gabriela de Quieroz, IBM’s Head Evangelist, who made a career switch just like Alexandra. Except her story involved a shift in industries, going from statistician to data scientist and overcoming the challenge of learning programming for the first time, as she describes in her video below. And of course, there’s always story of data itself – this piece from Recode gives us confidence that “data will amplify the social impact of female leaders.”  The commonality between all these career success stories and ours is that confidence can be built by overcoming challenges and experimenting with new avenues through which to channel our growing skills.

Untwisting Your Tuesdays

On March 12th from 7-8 pm EST, we will be hosting our second Tuesdays Together chat on our slack channel. The chat will center around building our career paths, but we also want to get to know you and create an inspiring community where we can all talk. Fortunately for all of us, that community involves Jeanne Holm, Deputy CIO and Mayor’s Senior Tech Advisor at the City of Los Angeles. She will be the featured co-moderator on this month’s chat. Starstruck already? Jeanne’s former titles include Evangelist for open data at the U.S. White House, Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA, Fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics and Distinguished Instructor at UCLA.

If you haven’t joined our slack channel yet, be sure to do so before March 12th so you can ask Jeanne questions about any or all of her careers while sharing insights with colleagues. You can access all the highlights from the first Tuesday’s Together in February on DSS Roundtable.

If you have any further questions about how to join the chat, please email doberdier@formulated.by and we will set you up.

We Found the (Career) Path to Enlightenment

And we can’t wait to travel it with you! Amy Yu, VP of Product Strategy and Data Science at Viacom and Friederike Schuur, Director of Machine Learning and Research at Cityblock Health, will take the virtual stage on our podcast, DSSe Voices, sharing their own career-building stories in hopes of elevating yours.  Amy holds degrees from University of Pennsylvania and MIT Media Lab. She applies her unique skills in data visualization to her career at Viacom as an advocate for how data can drive the best decisions for business. Friederike, an Assembly Fellow at MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, directs much of her machine learning expertise towards improving performance within the healthcare space. However, she is also currently working with a team of ethnographers to bring concepts of augmented reality into people’s homes using algorithms.

Did you catch our first podcast? In “You’re not an Imposter,” acclaimed econometrician Amar Natt and award-winning New Orleans campaign manager Kelsey Foster seek to raise women’s confidence in their capabilities.

We know after listening you may wonder how YOU can be featured on DSSe Voices in the future. Take a moment and apply!

The Early Bird Gets the Dataset

If any or all of these events sound appealing to you, we request that you visit the DSSe page to watch more content and see what we’re all about. If you like it, make some noise and share with a friend! Our DSSe content is created for you, but it is also created by you.  You are the leading force in building this revolutionary new community and we can’t wait to work with you.

This post is part of DSSe, an initiative to elevate the voices of women in data science.