Why women in Data #Beawomanindataviz event

Only the 18% of data scientist is a Woman and women account for only the 26% of data jobs in the US. 

Following an article about Gender equality by the British Government , I would like to talk about a woman only event organised by Data + Women and hosted by the The Information Lab UK. The scope of the event was to gather women for a day to increase their involvement in data science and analytics with some Tableau training.

Program of the event

At the event no prior knowledge of Tableau was required and there weren’t any other requirements: no matter the background or the experience, 35 eager to learn women attended the event and asked many questions.

What drove 35 women to spend a Saturday together was: curiosity, ambition, motivation, passion, dedication and also a lot more that came up when talking to them individually.

The 35 participants are divided into 2 groups for frontal teaching by the members of the Information Lab and Data + Women Group. The first part of the Tableau training involved the analysis of Transport For London Santander bike data.

At the same time of the teaching, the rest of the team is ready to answer to any questions individually and everybody is willing to help those who are going at a different speed compared to the rest of the group: somebody went even faster.

Everybody was very focused and asked many questions: showing enthusiasm for everything is just the right approach when talking about data!

After breaking for lunch, the 35 female were allocated to two different projects: one looking at Kiva Microfinance for entrepreneurs, who do not have access to bank loans and use Kiva as a support for their bussiness; while the second group analysed Spotify data to understand music streaming habits. Everything that they learnt during the morning was going to be applied to their personal project on the afternoon. Many participants never used Tableau Public before, others had some experience but also many questions for the rest of the team.

Curiosity lead the afternoon project, which ended up with presentations by the 4 brave participants. At the end of the project presentation, the Information Lab and Data + Women Group from Tableau walked through the application process to transform an happy Saturday into a day job. The women run event was an opportunity to create a bigger community of data scientists, develop their interests and give them the opportunity to start a career in Data Science. 

We want more women in Data, so if you haven’t done already: download Tableau public, create a data visualisation and sent it to the Data School, we are looking forward to hearing from you!

We are representing the 30% of employees at the Information Lab and we are looking forward to seeing more applications from women.