Women in Machine Learning and Data Science Paris
WiMLDS, which stands for Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, is an international association whose mission is to support and promote women and gender minorities who are practicing, studying or are interested in the fields of machine learning and data science.
WiMLDS Paris was founded in 2017 and it has been run by a team of volunteers. With over 5000 members, it is the 2nd largest WiMLDS community in the world.
WiMLDs Paris organises meetups, talks, panel discussions, open source sprints, hackathons, networking events, career development workshops, informal coding sessions, visits to technology museums…
Jihane, Caroline, Juliette, Joëlle, Laure, Natalie, Marie, Anna, Chloé from WiMLDS Paris
Meeting and Networking in Paris
Since the beginning, we have organised over 45 events featuring almost 150 female speakers! It is important to note that speakers are always women, in stark contrast with most technical conferences, where the majority of speakers are male.
The benefit of WiMLDS Paris events is that these are local events and are entirely free, which makes them accessible to anyone. The scope of the impact of WiMLDS Paris meetup transcends cultural and social differences. In Paris, we run our meetups entirely in English in order to make the knowledge accessible beyond the Parisian scene. By attending our meetups, WiMLDS members (aspiring data scientists, university students, software engineers, researchers...) can listen to technical talks and extend their skills no matter their social, economic, or education background.
WiMLDS is inclusive to anyone who supports the advancement of women in DS, ML, and AI, as we know that women cannot progress without the alliance of men. Men are always welcome to attend our events, and many of them expressed their appreciation of WiMLDS professionalism and high level of contributions.
Promoting women and their work in Data and AI
To create role models, we promote women and their work on social media, for example by sharing scientific papers written or co-written by women. We also encourage women to speak at conferences and share opportunities with our community members.
To promote knowledge sharing, we systematically put summaries of our events, including slides and videos, on our Medium page. Most content is technical, but we also invite talks about career development. Below you can see a small sample.
+ What did we learn from our data science salary survey? We organised a salary negotiation workshop and summarised our findings in this article.
+ How to find a job as a foreigner? The speaker related her experience in France, but the lessons learned can be applied to other EU countries. The slides and summary are in this article.
+ Changing careers into tech is a hot topic. The speaker shared her journey from marketing to tech landing a job at Google during the pandemics. The slides and summary are in this article.
Intro to Large Language Models, by Laure Soulier - associate professor at Sorbonne University, member WiMLDS
To sum up
To tackle unconscious biases and under-representation of women in machine learning and data science, WiMLDS Paris creates role models by promoting women experts, scouting the first time speakers, and raising visibility of women in these highly critical fields.