When Women in Statistics Come to Know Their Power
The inaugural Women in Statistics Conference was held May 15–17, 2014, in Cary, North Carolina. This conference targeted women in career stages from undergraduate through tenured professor and senior leader in industry and government.
Enthusiastic women (and men) joined together to share candid experiences, inspiring stories, and empowering talks. The theme of the conference was “Know Your Power,” so of most import was women sharing transformative moments in their lives, explaining how those moments affected their careers, and demonstrating how these individual moments led to changes improving the stature of all women in statistics.
While historically women in statistics have faced diverse challenges, the conference was organized to spotlight the contributions of women to the field and the enormous progress that has been made over the last 50 years. Lynne Billard gave an opening talk, titled “Finding Our Place in History: Progress of Women Pioneers and Trailblazers,” in which she discussed the tremendous progress made by early trailblazers such as Florence Nightingale, F. N. David, Gertrude Cox, and Elizabeth Scott. She shared statistics showing little change in the percentage of tenured women and salary increases of female faculty trailing those of men by 5–15%. Despite this, the number of women faculty has increased. She emphasized women faculty are not taking jobs from men, but rather universities have been expanding the number of faculty over time.
As many female statisticians still face pay and gender inequality in their careers, it is important that we as a community recognize and support other women in their accomplishments, such as Grace Wahba giving the COPSS Fisher Lecture at JSM in 2014. She is another great example of a trailblazer who faced many challenges in her early career, yet has provided so many significant contributions to the field.
Three recurring themes woven throughout the conference were the importance of mentoring, networking, and leadership. This conference was the first of its kind to provide mentoring and insight from an entire community of female statisticians in industry, academia, and government. Michelle Dunn, Bonnie Ray, Kim Weems, and Linda Young led a panel on formal and informal mentoring in which they all echoed the importance of identifying one’s needs and career goals, actively seeking multiple mentors throughout one’s career, and giving back by being a mentor.
A closing piece of advice from organizer Dalene Stangl was to look for mentoring in unexpected places. In closing remarks, she gave thanks to the conference management team, which provided her with some of the best mentoring of her career. The conference also provided ample opportunities for participant mentoring during a speed mentoring activity led by Janet Bickel and during many breakfast and lunch roundtable discussions focused on important professional development topics. Outside of the talks and roundtable sessions, there were many interactions between young and senior statisticians that led to wider networks for mentoring and collaboration.
One of the most important messages of the conference was that the time to start networking is now! Alicia Carriquiry discussed how to build and nurture one’s professional network by attending professional meetings, never turning down the opportunity to present your work, introducing yourself to people you would like to meet, creating and practicing your elevator pitch, and getting objective reviews of your performance early in your career. If you are a young professor, invite other young professors from different departments to give talks and you may have the opportunity to do the same in their department. Jessica Utts shared that she came to “know her power” when she recognized the value of networking.
Multiple sessions focused on leadership. Sallie Keller, in a talk titled “Leadership: The Untold Story,” explained how leaders need to distinguish between coaching, mentoring, and counseling and to know how and when to use each effectively. Laura Meyerson, Maura Stokes, and Hairong Crigler discussed various leadership styles and key leadership characteristics. These included how a leader listens and respects the views of others, makes timely decisions, creates an environment that fosters feedback, takes charge, is not afraid of conflict (or is at least not paralyzed by it), and—most importantly—leads by example. Bickel’s talk, “Power, Gender, and Advancement,” discussed how women in positions of power often face career challenges such as having fewer role models and underestimating their own abilities. She advised that women are less likely to negotiate their real worth as frequently as men. Rather than focus on the doubt, she suggested women practice ‘self-presentation’ (advocating for oneself and educating others about what you can contribute) and effective negotiation and communication skills.
For early-career statisticians, there was an abundance of practical advice such as surviving graduate school, the value of internships, answering tricky interview questions, things I wish I knew when I started working, optimizing your job search, how to negotiate what you are worth, and preparing for promotion in academia. Panelists Layla Parast, Jessica Minnier, and Jessie Jeng shared their first-year experiences during post-PhD—what to expect your first year. This session encouraged postdocs to learn more scripting languages (e.g., Python); practice writing grants; and to publish, publish, publish. They pointed out the biggest transitions from postdoc to professor are more meetings, finding your own collaborators, and less protected research time.
As statisticians, one of the most undervalued tools for building a brand is the use of social media (blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn). Arati Mejdal presented a talk that provided many examples of statisticians and data scientists who have done this, including Hilary Mason (popular blog and Twitter feed), Emma Pierson (recent graduate from Stanford who wrote a hilarious article for FiveThirtyEight showing people really just want to date themselves), and Andrew Gelman who says he uses his blog as a way to “steer statistics in a useful way.” Two key points to make the most of social media are to post regularly and actively comment and engage in discussions. As statisticians or data scientists, the best posts are visual and brief, and they are different from academic articles (expert, but friendly).
One particularly difficult topic many female statisticians face, but rarely discuss, is what is known as the “imposter syndrome,” in which a person is unable to accept their accomplishments despite external evidence of their competence and success. Utts noted the imposter syndrome is not the same thing as low self-esteem: Low self-esteem is boosted when you have a success, but the imposter syndrome makes you feel more terrified if you have a success. During a panel of five past (and future) ASA presidents, each panelist openly acknowledged feeling the imposter syndrome at some point in her career and advised that the key is finding ways to navigate through it. The panelists advised the audience to recognize and acknowledge the feeling, rather than ignore it in a way that will lead to discouragement and debilitation. They encouraged the audience to focus on strengths and what they have accomplished compared to the things they have not. For some additional thoughts on this, check out Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and The Confidence Gap.
The last advice of the ASA presidents’ panel was to do what makes you happy. It does not matter if your career takes you into academia, industry, government, or a bit of all three. As Sally Morton said, “Go where you will have the most impact and be most happy. If you are happy, that’s where you’ll be the most productive.” Rachel Schutt discussed how she did not know how all the pieces of her career (e.g., graduate school, teaching, working at Google, being a professor at Columbia University) would fit together at her current position, but she took the risk and just did what made her happy. Francesca Dominici led a powerful discussion about why women can’t have it all and emphasized it is perfectly acceptable (and should not be discouraged) to be passionate and committed about work and to want to spend time with family. She argued “academic success” should be redefined to include rewards for teaching and mentoring, but it also should be recognized that to achieve this, there needs to be a cultural change among both men and women.
The challenges that lie ahead are well established, but now there is a defined community of women with a goal to empower and encourage the younger generation of women to study and contribute to statistics. Change is a slow process, but the trailblazers can be confident that their efforts are recognized and valued, and that their efforts have inspired a vibrant community of women to take on the challenges ahead. Thank you to the organizers and everyone who contributed to this extraordinary conference. I would highly recommend Women in Statistics to future participants and I look forward to attending
in 2016!
About the Author
Stephanie Hicks (@stephaniehicks) is a postdoc in the Rafael Irizarry lab (@rafalab) in the department of biostatistics and computational biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health. She earned her BS in mathematics from LSU and her MA and PhD from the department of statistics at Rice University under the direction of Marek Kimmel and Sharon Plon (@splon). Her research interests focus on developing statistical methods and tools in application for genomics and epigenomics data.
