Careers in Statistics: Female experiences of a career in data
Earlier in November our Senior Statistical Consultant, Jo, was delighted to chair the speaker session of a Royal Statistical Society (RSS) event – “Careers in Statistics: Female experiences of a career in data”. The event was co-organised by the RSS’s Women in Data Science and Statistics special interest group (of which Jo is a member) and the Young Statisticians Section, which unites young statisticians from all sectors and provides resources for the community of young statisticians.
The session, which aimed to provide advice and encourage career-young women pursuing a career in statistics or data science, featured short talks followed by a panel session of questions from the audience.
The six guest speakers were women whose careers spanned both academia and industry, including Professor Deborah Ashby, past President of the RSS and Director of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London where she holds the Chair in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials, and was Founding Co-Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit. The speakers described their career paths and how they had followed their interests. They spoke of the opportunities, decisions and advice taken along the way. The event created a lot of discussion from different perspectives with questions from the audience covering where to get experience, how to find the key opportunities, balancing the commitments of family life and a career, and experiences of founding and running a company.
Jo commented that, “it was a great opportunity to share experiences and gain advice from women who between them had a wide variety of experience, and fantastic too that we were joined by an audience of over 130!”.