WiDS Africa Conference: Where women data scientists #BreakTheBias

Mahadia Tunga, dLab Co-Founder and Director of Data Science

The Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference brings together female experts from all over the world. It was founded in 2015 at Stanford University when when a Stanford professor, Margot Gerritsen, and her colleague, Karen Matthys, noticed that fewer women than men applied for STEM related degrees. Now, WiDS Conference is held in more than 200 locations around the world annually. 

Generally speaking, it is a tough world being a woman at the workplace. From a wide gender pay gap, insufficient child care and caregiving support to facing unconscious bias, women have to put in a lot more effort than men to excel in their career. 

dLab has organised the WiDS Africa Conference with H3ABionet (South Africa) and Microsoft Africa Research Institute (Kenya) since 2019. Prior to that, dLab has organised a WiDS Dar es Salaam event in 2018. This year’s event was attended by more than 100 people both in-person and online. WiDS Africa attracted data scientists, college students across disciplines from various universities, Government officials, and development partners across Africa.

As a hybrid space, the conference provides a platform where female scientists showcase their products and share their career journey. By featuring all-female speakers in a male-dominated field, we believe it is the best way to inspire women into the data science field; maintaining a rich pipeline of female scientists so that early career women can find female role models. 

The theme for WIDS Africa this year was “The role of data science in improving women’s health and safety”. Dr. Salome, a lecturer from the University of Dar es Salaam insisted on having more women in the field of data science so that data science products and services are gender-inclusive. On the other hand, Neema Mgimba Co-Founder of Sheria Kingajani platform, cautioned data scientists on ensuring privacy to the data they use to build models.

In this post-pandemic times, at least I believe we are in the post-pandemic period, we have witnessed data science as a powerful weapon in combating COVID-19. Beyond COVID-19, machine learning models are used in the diagnosis of various diseases such as cancer, heart disease, etc. Despite tremendous scientific progress of data in the health sector, machine learning models in use today do not account for bias detection. Such bias could lead to wrong diagnosis and jeopardize women’s health and safety. At this year’s conference, participants discussed the impact of gender bias and how it can be mitigated in order to improve women’s health and safety. 

Statistician General of the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics Dr. Albina Chuwa

In her keynote address, the Statistician General of the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics Dr. Albina Chuwa emphasized on the importance of creating a pipeline of female data scientists as they are very few in the field. For instance, according to UNESCO, only 30% of women work in the ICT sector. This contributes to creating an unfriendly environment for them since “Women need to work twice or even thrice to be accepted in the work environment”.

Furthermore 23% of women globally are uneducated, thus most women engage in manual labor such as agriculture. So in order to have a rich pipeline of female data scientists, we need to also attract girls at lower levels to pursue careers in STEM fields. The biggest enemy among women towards STEM subjects is a negative mindset, that STEM is hard and it is not for women. In this regard, there is a need to catch their mindsets at early stages. CodeLikeAGirl and Smarts Girls are dLab programs run in collaboration with various partners to do just that. 

dLab in partnership with WiDS Worldwide ambassadors has launched a data science scholarship to sponsor female students to pursue masters in data science at the University of Dar es Salaam. This year three students have been sponsored. 

Due to the high volume of requests, the next WiDS Africa conference is going to bring more experts to deliver hands-on sessions on key technologies, stay tuned! 

If you would like to partner with dLab in sponsoring more women into data science kindly connect with us via connect@dlab.or.tz

You can watch the conference sessions here: