February 11, 2021 will mark the sixth International Day of Women and Girls in Science worldwide.
The idea of a world day dedicated to women – and girls – engaged in science was born on the occasion of the World Women’s Health and Development Forum in 2015, in New York, at the United Nations headquarters. It became reality a few months later, with a much more ambitious goal than what may appear at first glance.
This day, in fact, should not be interpreted as a moment to celebrate only the merits of a few good female scientists. Instead, it should be seen as a stimulus to the international community in pursuing gender equality goals in terms of educational opportunities, preparation, and scientific careers.
Indeed, the United Nationswebpage dedicated to the day reads:
“Over the past 15 years, the international community has made many efforts to inspire and engage women and girls in science. However, women and girls continue to be excluded from full participation in science. Currently, less than 30% of researchers worldwide are women. According to UNESCO data (2014-2016), only about 30% of all female students choose fields related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in higher education. Globally, female student enrollment is particularly low in information technology (3%), natural sciences, mathematics and statistics (5%), and engineering (8%).”
Data that make you think and that, in our small way, we hope to be able to refute. In the past two years, in fact, the percentage of women employed in Visualitics who work in Data Science has tripled. As of today, we count among our ranks 10 female employees between Italy and Spain, almost half of the entire team.
This has certainly not happened only to maintain a gender equality facade, although we are very sensitive about this issue, but for obvious merits that today we would like to show you by presenting some of the personal works of our girls.
Let’s start with this viz created by Sabrina Zamberletti, among the first women hired in Visualitics, who – needless to say! – has created a dashboard on the digital gender gap, which records the differences in access to digital resources between men and women in the world:
Then, we have the dashboard by Marta Bettinardi who, in collaboration with Diana Caicedo, created a visualization starting from Tableau’s Sample Superstore data. In particular, we used the monitoring data of orders and shipments in express mode by air in Italy and Germany: special care was taken for the purely graphical aspect, and the tree structure for KPIs greatly facilitated the final analysis
And we come to the work of our most recent “discoveries”: Francesca Pigni who has created a dashboard, of which we show you a preview, to display specific KPIs: the current value is thus compared with that of the previous period, for a faster analysis.
Finally, Rosa Cafasso – hired just a month ago – wanted to make her contribution by sharing with us this first viz, in which the 100 most powerful women in the world appear divided by country and sector, according to a study by Forbes.
We are aware that there is still a lot of work to do in order to achieve full equality of rights and access to scientific education in the world. We, in our small way, hope to continue to make our contribution in this sense, as we have always done, not only on February 11 but every day!
