Today is International Women’s Day and I’m more inspired than ever about the promise for women in all industries. Yesterday, I viewed a TED Talk, Teach girls bravery, not perfection, by Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code. Let me tell you- those was 12 minutes and 39 seconds were well spent! In this presentation, Saujani described some of her experiences with bravery, her failure and her successes; as well as the general consensus that girls and women are not taking the same risks that our male counterparts are. She cited statistics to display the difference in how girls and boys approach hard problems and women and men approach their career choices in adulthood.
I’m no stranger to the reality that there’s a huge disparity between the number of men and women in the current STEM culture; I’ve read many posts and articles on the subject. The point of view in Saujani’s presentation has resonated with me the most so far. As a mother of a brave young girl, and founder of a technology focused conference company, this issue is close to my heart. The perfectionist gene just might be present in my make-up and often motivates me to work harder, but also gets in my way. This video solidified my desire to encourage my growing daughter to strive for braveness, not perfection. I’ve found it equally important to encourage my female peers and derive my inspiration from viewing their bravery and to follow suit with taking risks and leaping out in faith.
This concept has expanded into my professional life at MLconf. We started hosting MLconf events in 2012, with a small percentage of females in attendance, often no female presenters. As of 2014, we began focussing on hosting balanced and diverse rosters of presenters at each event. In April of 2014, our first event in NYC hosted a full day event, with 17 speakers, 9 of which were female. We’ve taken that approach with all subsequent events, and intend to keep this goal of diverse speaking rosters. Over the span of our most recent 7 conferences, the percentage of female speakers has ranged from 20% to 52.97%. Of course, several factors are considered during each speaker selection made, including topic relevance, industry knowledge, clarity of message, etc.. However, we believe that encouraging women in STEM can start at a small scale- in each school, in each company, in each conference; and this is our effort to encourage and acknowledge the brilliant women in machine learning.
Last year, we initiated the MLconf Industry Impact Student Research Award, which was sponsored by Google. The winners were Furong Huang, Research Assistant, UC Irvine and Virginia Smith, Researcher, UC Berkeley. We were excited to see that the committee picked two women as the winners among so many candidates. Both winners have been invited to present at future MLconf events.
We would also like to encourage women interested in machine learning to attend conferences and learn what ml methods, techniques, algorithms and tools are being applied today in industry. Mention Women33 and save 33% on tickets to our next event in NYC on Friday, April 15th.
We’re also calling for speakers for events in Atlanta, London and San Francisco this year. Please join us!
