How digital analytics paves the way to gender parity
Digital analytics is “the new black” when it comes to driving disruptive change and leapfrogging economic evolution. Unsurprisingly, companies across industries and functions cannot seem to get enough of it – everyone is pursuing the promise of big money through advanced analytics and digitalization, and this trend becomes stronger year after year.
What does digital analytics have to do with gender parity?
I believe that digital analytics levels the playing field for women and men across the board like no other discipline has done before – with one prerequisite:
One has to belong to the rare species of data engineers, data scientists or any of the other highly sought-after talent pools that allow companies to tap into the potential of big data and artificial intelligence.
Is working in digital analytics really all it takes?
According to my story – it might be...
I started in the consulting world – equipped with an economics degree, I turned down an offer from a strategy house to work for Accenture on ecommerce projects for blue chip clients and pursue my dream of becoming a digital native. Well, a few months after I had signed the contract, the internet bubble burst and there went my dream to work in the online world.
Things changed when a few years later Yahoo! was looking for an analyst for their Search and Media advertising business – they liked my consulting twist and I jumped at the chance to finally enter the online world.
It was at Yahoo! that I had an eye-opening experience that would forever manifest my passion for digital analytics. I ran an optimization on the advertising inventory that Yahoo! features on every page. Different formats and positions were ready to be filled with online ads – their value depending on the interest level of users among other variables that influenced the price Yahoo! could get from advertising clients.
I gave the analysis a new twist by adding a few variables and BOOM: The data magic of three days’ work helped earn Yahoo! additional revenue equivalent to three years my gross pay. I was thrilled with this enormous impact of a – to today’s standards – very basic piece of analysis, and vowed to stay the course toward digital analytics.
Over the next few years, life kicked in – marriage, kids – events that tend to have a slow-down effect on a professional career…and yet this wasn’t the case for me. In fact, I experienced the opposite.
My part-time schedule did not keep a large media house from hiring me to head up the business intelligence department at their online agency subsidiary. I sold projects to, and worked for, large retail and media clients revamping their online analytics.
With technology becoming more sophisticated, we were getting deeper and deeper into large-scale analytics work in big data environments. This led to another opportunity: An ad tech company hired me to build and lead the data science department. I became their first-ever director allowed in on a part-time contract.
One can argue that all this came to pass due to a good amount of luck, opportunities opening up in just the right moment, having the right network, etc. I agree that these matters always play their part – and yet…
To broaden my perspective for this article, I spoke with former colleagues, bosses and clients and ended up with
3 main reasons why digital analytics is a significant driver for gender parity:
Scarcity of talent:
The scarcity of analytics talent in the digital world more than compensates the part-time work and other challenges that women have to deal with (staying home because of sick kids, for example).
Quantity ≠ quality & impact:
The additional gains achieved through applying digital analytics seldom correlate with the time invested in analyzing and modeling. The previously stated example at Yahoo! is only one of many cases I was made aware of.
Portfolio is king when tackling uncertainty:
Digital analytics is a young discipline, so everyone is more open to experiment and think outside the box than in other fields. Because there is no proven path to success, the usual rules do not apply. The best way to tackle uncertainty is to try and test, and to work with variety in portfolios, be that programming languages or women alongside men.
While this is not the solution for all root causes of gender inequality, digital analytics present a viable opportunity for a solid step in the right direction. I hope this article helps to encourage women pondering career choices to give digital analytics a shot.