Women in Statistics

Seriously, it's cool

Shannon Gallagher
PhD Student, Dept. of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University

What do you think of when see you the word 'statistics'?

  • Mean, median, mode?

  • Baseball?

  • Ughhhhh

But Statistics is much more!

  • Statistics <-> Machine Learning (Think Google!)

  • Experimental Design

  • Visualizations

  • Analysis

  • Collaboration with other Sciences (and Humanities and even Art!)

  • Programming

The catch all is "Data Scientist"

Google Deep Mind - Artificial Intelligence

Snapchat

New York Times

Stitch Fix

This is just the tip of the Iceberg!

"The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard."

  • John Tukey

I'm working on predicting the spread of disease

  • SPEW - Synthetic Populations and Ecosystems of the World

  • Predicting the flu

  • Predicting the "next" disease

All work is collaborative!

Collaborators include: Professors Bill Eddy, Ryan Tibshirani, Roni Rosenfeld, Sam Ventura, and student Lee Richardson

We need more women in statistics and science!

Borrowing from Nature,

  • Women bring different life experiences than men

  • We need to recruit the most talented people

  • STEM jobs pay very well and women should have access to those jobs

How can you get more involved with statistics?

  • Math!

  • Programming!

Ok, but how can I get more involved without 10 more years of school?

Statistical Thinking is more than just crunching the numbers. It is

  1. Following through your experiments from beginning to end

  2. Reasoning about your data to validate assumptions and find explanations, outliers, and flaws

  3. Visualizing your results in a coherent way

  4. Presenting your results to others

  5. Asking questions about why and how

You can get started with any one of these steps today!

Additionally, you can start coding today! It's a lot of fun.

  • Collection

  • Analysis

  • Visualization

In fact, we will do that now!