Why African scientists are studying the genes of African species, and how they do it modernghana.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from modernghana.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Data science needs input from women
Being involved in the inaugural Women in Data Science (WiDS) Africa conference struck me as an opportunity to try to give credence to literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay on colonialism and allow the “subaltern to speak”.
As a feminist ally, I passed the mic to some phenomenal women who are generally underpaid, underrepresented and unseen in the world of data science which, especially in Africa, is male-dominated.
Data has been referred to as the new oil because it is a valuable asset that has the potential to transform the way society operates. Data science is the interdisciplinary, complex employment of big data, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics and is a fast-growing field of science. It is increasingly being used to inform policy and decision-making in both government and the private sectors, but representation in the field remains unequal.