Women are changing the world of data science

On November 2, 2015, 400 data scientists gathered at Stanford for the inaugural Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference. This one-day technical conference boasted an all-women speaker lineup – which, according to conference host Margot Gerritsen, director of the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), defies statistics and probabilities in technological fields. World-class speakers including Caitlin Smallwood, vice president for science and algorithms at Netflix; Jennifer Chayes, Microsoft research scientist; and Fei-Fei Li, Stanford computer science professor, came together to inspire, educate and highlight the impact women are making in this field.