Women In Data Science

Attaining tenured status at a major university is often the culmination of an academic’s career; giving it up is unthinkable for most. But after 10 years at UCLA, Jennifer Chayes was offered a job at Microsoft. The offer, she says,“scared me to death,” but she took the job and is now managing director for Microsoft Research in New England, New York and Montreal. “There are brass rings that come along,and they always come along at the most inopportune times,and they look really scary, but I believe that we should grab them when they come along,” Chayes says during a conversation with Stanford’s Margot Gerritsen, Stanford professor and host of the Women in Data Science podcast. Chayes is a big advocate of eliminating biases in search algorithms and believes that data scientists have “the opportunity to build algorithms with fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics, or FATE.” FATE, a group that formed at one of Chayes’ labs, works to address inequity in the field. In one particular instance, the group