 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science 2023. As every year we are here live at Stanford University profiling some amazing women and men in the fields of data science. I have my co-host for this segment, it's Hannah Freitag. Hannah is from Stanford's data journalism program. Really interesting, check it out. We're very pleased to welcome our first guest of the day, Fresh from the keynote stage, Gayatri Ganu, the VP of Data Science at Meta. Gayatri, it's great to have you on the program. Likewise, thank you for having me. So you have a PhD in computer science. You shared some really cool stuff. Everyone knows Facebook, everyone uses it. I think my mom might be one of the biggest users and she's probably watching right now. Who don't, people don't realize there's so much data behind that and data that drives decisions that we engage with. But talk to me a little bit about you first. PhD in computer science, were you always, were you like a STEM kid, little Gayatri little STEM? Yeah, I was a STEM kid. I grew up in Mumbai, India. My parents are actually pharmacists, so they were not like math or stats or anything like that. But I was always a STEM kid. I don't know, I think it, I think when I was in sixth grade, when we got our first personal computer, and I obviously use it as a backman playing machine. I use the games. But I was so good at, and I honestly believe, I think being good at games kind of got me more familiar and comfortable with computers. Yeah, I think I always like computers. Yeah. And so now, you Lee, I'm looking at my notes here, the engagement ecosystem and monetization data science teams at Facebook. And I talk about those, what are the missions of those teams and how does it impact the everyday user? Yeah, so the engagement is basically users coming back to our platform more. There's no better way for users to tell us that they are finding value on things that we're doing on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all the other products than coming back to our platform more. The engagement ecosystem team is looking at trends, looking at where there are needs, looking at how users are changing their behaviors and helping build strategy for the long term using that data knowledge. Monetization is very different. Obviously the top, top apex goal is have a sustainable business so that we can continue building products for our users. And so, but I said this in my keynote today, it's not about making money. Our mission statement is not, you know, maximize as much money as you can make. It's about building a meaningful connection between businesses, customers, users. And you know, especially in these last two or three funky post pandemic years, it's been such a big and important thing to do for small businesses all around the world. For users to find like goods and services and products that they care about and that they can connect to. So, you know, there is truly a connection between my engagement world and the monetization world. And, you know, it's not very clear always till you go into, like you peel the layers. Everything we do in the ads world is also always first with users as our, you know, guiding principle. Yeah, you mentioned how you supported especially small businesses. Also during the pandemic, you touched a bit upon in the keynote speech. Can you tell our audience what were like special or certain specific programs you implemented to support especially small businesses during this time? Yeah, so there are 200 million businesses on our platform. A lot of them small businesses. 10 million of them run ads. So there is a large number of like businesses on our platform who, you know, use the power of social media to connect to the customers that matter to them to like, you know, use the free products that we build. In the post pandemic years, we built a lot of stuff very quickly when COVID first hit for business to get the word out, right? Like they had to announce when special shopping hours existed for at-risk populations or when certain goods and services were available versus not, we had grants. There's a hundred million dollar grant that we gave out to small businesses. Users could show sort of, you know, show their support with a bunch of campaigns that we ran. And of course we continue running ads. Our ads are very effective, I guess, in, you know, getting a very reliable connection with, from the customer to the business. And so, you know, we've run all these studies. We support, I talked about two examples today. One of them is the largest black-owned, woman black-owned wine company and how they needed to move to an online program. And, you know, we gave them a grant and supported them through their ads campaign. And, you know, they saw 60% lift and purchases or something like that. A lot of good stories, small stories, you know, on a scale of 200 million that really sort of make me feel proud about the work we do. And, you know, now more than ever before, I think people can connect so directly with businesses. You can WhatsApp them. I come from India. Every business is on WhatsApp. And you can, you know, WhatsApp them. You can send them Facebook messages and you can build this like direct connection with things that matter to you. We have this expectation that we can be connected anywhere. I was just at Mobile World Congress for MWC last week where I'm obviously talking about connectivity. We want to be able to do any transaction, whether it's post on Facebook or Colin Uber or watch on Netflix if you're on the road. We expect that we're going to be connected. Yeah. And what we, I think a lot of us don't realize, I mean, those of us in tech do, but how much data science is a facilitator of all of those interactions. As we, as we guide you guys, we talk about like any business, whether it is the black women owned wine business, great business or a grocer or a car dealer. Everybody has to become data driven because the consumer has the expectation. Talk about data science as a facilitator of just pretty much everything we're doing and conducting in our daily lives. Yeah. I think that's a great question. I think data science as a field wasn't really defined like maybe 15 years ago, right? So this is all in our lifetimes that we are seeing this. Even in data science today, people come from so many different backgrounds and bring their own expertise here. And I think we, you know, this conference, all of us get to define what that means and how we can bring data to do good in the world. Everything you do, as you said, there is a lot of data. Facebook has a lot of data, Meta has a lot of data. And how do we responsibly use this data? How do we use this data to make sure that we're representing all diversity, minorities, like machine learning algorithms don't do well with small data, they do well with big data, but the small data matters and how do you bring that into algorithms? So everything we do at Meta is very, very data driven. I feel proud about that to be honest because while data gets a bad rap, sometimes having no data and making decisions in the blind is just the absolute worst thing you can do. And so, you know, the job as a data scientist at Facebook is to make sure that we use this data, use this responsibly, make sure that we're representing every aspect of the, you know, three billion users who come to our platform, yeah, have data serves all the products that we build here. The responsibility factor is huge. You know, we can't talk about AI without talking about ethics. One of the things that I was talking with Hannah and our other co-host Tracy about during our opening is something I just learned over the weekend. And that is that the CTO of chat GPT is a woman. I didn't know that. And I thought, why is she getting more aware? It's just a lot of conversations with their CEO. Everyone's using it, playing around with it. I actually asked it yesterday, what's hot in data science? I was like, should I ask that to Mary Selton? What's hot? But I thought that was phenomenal and we need to be talking about this more. This is something that they're likening to the launch of the iPhone, which has transformed our lives in chat GPT. And its chief technologist is a female. How great is that? And I don't know the stats around this, but I think CTO is even less, it's even more rare to have a woman there. Like you have women CEOs because, I mean, we are going, we are building upon yours and yours of women not choosing technical fields and not choosing STEM. And it's going to take some time, but yeah, yeah, she is a woman. Isn't that amazing? It's wonderful. Yes, there was a great, there's a great fast company article on her that I was looking at yesterday and I just thought, we need to do what we can to help spread. Mira Murati is her name because what she's doing is, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs we may ever see in our lifetime. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. I also wanted to share some stats. Oh, sorry, go ahead Anna. Yeah, I was going to follow up on the thing that you mentioned that we had many years with like not enough women choosing a career path and STEM and that we have to overcome this trend. What are some, like what is some advice you have like as the vice president, data science, like what can we do to make this feel more, you know, approachable and accessible for women? There's so much that we have done already and we want to continue to keep doing. Of course conferences like this, these where, you know, and I think there are high school students here, there are students from my alma mater's undergrad here. It's amazing to like get all these women together to get them to see what success could look like, what like being a woman leader in this space could look like. So that's, you know, that's one. At Meta, I lead recruiting at Meta and we've done a bunch to sort of open up the thinking around data science and technical jobs for women, simple things like what you write in your job description. I don't know whether you know this, or this is a story you've heard before. When you have a job description and there are like 10 things that you need to, you know, be good at to apply to this job, a woman sees those 10 and says, okay, I don't meet the qualifications of one of them and she doesn't apply. And a man sees one that he meets the qualifications to and he applies. And so, you know, there's small things you can do and just how you write your job description, what goals you set for diversity and inclusion for your own organization. We have goals. Facebook's always been pretty up there and like, you know, speaking out for diversity and Shell Sandberg has been our chief business officer for a very long time and she's been like amazing at us, like pushing for more women. So yeah, every step of the way, I think we made a lot of progress. To be honest, I do think women choose STEM fields a lot more than they did. When I did my computer science, I was often one of the one or two women in the computer science class. It takes some time for it to percolate all the way to like having more CTOs and CEOs, but it's going to happen in a lifetime. And you know, three of us know this, women are going to rule the world. And it is true. And dropped a mic, girl. And it is going to happen in our lifetime, so we are excited about it. And we have responsibility in helping make that happen. You know, I'm curious, you were in STEM, you talked about computer science being one of the only females. What, one of the things that the any2b.org data from 2022 showed some good numbers. The number of women in technical roles is now 27.6%, I believe. So up from 25, it's up in 22, which is good. More hiring of women. One of the biggest challenges is attrition. What keeps you motivated to stay where you are, doing what you're doing, managing a family, and helping to drive these experiences at Facebook that we all expect are just going to happen? Yeah. Two things come to mind. It does take a village. You do need people around you. You know, I'm grateful for my husband. You talked about managing a family. I did the very Indian thing and my parents live with us and they helped take care of the kids. My kids are young, six and four, and I definitely needed help over the last few years. It takes mentors, it takes other people that you look up to who've gone through all of those same challenges and can advise you to sort of continue working in the field. I remember when my kid was born, when he was six months old, I was considering quitting and my husband's like, to be a good role model for your children, you need to continue working. Like just being a mother is not enough. And so that's one, the village that you build around you, your supporters, your mentors who keep encouraging you. Cheryl Sandberg said this to me in my second month at Facebook, she said that women drop out of technical fields. They become managers. They become sort of administrative more in their nature of their work. And her advice was don't do that. Don't stop the technical. And I think that's the other thing I'd say to a lot of women, technical stuff is hard. But keeping up with that and keeping sort of on top of it actually does help you in the long run and has definitely helped me in my career at Facebook. I think one of the things and Hannah and I and Tracy talked about this in the open and I think you'll agree with us is the whole saying of you can't be what you can't see. And I like to see, you can be what you can see. That visibility, the great thing that Wids did is having you on the stage as a speaker this morning so people could understand everyone. Like I said, everyone knows meta. Everyone knows meta. And so it's important to bring that connection of how data is driving the experiences, the fact that it's user first, but we need to be able to see women in positions like you, especially with Cheryl stepping down moving on to something else. Or people that are like YouTube influencers that have no idea that the head of YouTube for a very long time, Susan Wojcicki, is a woman who pioneered streaming. And I mean, how often do you, are you on YouTube every day? But we have to be able to see and raise the profile of these women and learn from them and be inspired to keep going and going, I like what I do, I'm making a difference here. And I can be the sponsor or the mentor for somebody down the road. Absolutely. And then referring back to what we talked in the beginning show that data science is so diverse and it doesn't mean if you're like in IT, you're like sitting in your dog room, coding all day. But you know, to show the different facets of this job and make this appealing to women for sure. And I said this in my keynote too. You know, one of the things that helped me most is complimenting the data and the techniques and the algorithms with how you work with people and you know, empathy and alignment building and leadership, strategic thinking. And I think honestly, I think women do a lot of this stuff really well. We know how to work with people. And so, you know, I've seen this at Meta for sure. Like, you know, all of these skills, soft skills as we call them, go a long way and like, you know, doing the right things and having a lasting impact. And like I said, women are going to rule the world once, you know, in our lifetimes. Oh, I can't wait to see that happen. There's some interesting female candidates that are already throwing their hats in the ring for the next presidential election. So we'll have to see where that goes. But some of the things that are so interesting to me, here we are in California in Palo Alto, technically Stanford is its own zip code, I believe. And we're in California, we're freaking out because we've gotten so much rain. It's absolutely unprecedented. We need it. We need a massive drought from extreme drought, legally, technically, for many years. I've got friends that live up in Tahoe. I've been getting pictures this morning of windows that are covered. Yes, actually, yes, that were windows, like second story windows are covered in snow. Climate change. There's so much that data science is doing to power and power our understanding of climate change, whether it's that or police violence. Yeah, we had a talk today about discovery. Yeah, which is amazing. Yes. So I want more people to know what data science is really facilitating that impacts all of us, whether you're in a technical role or not. And data wins arguments. Yes, I love that. I said, this is my life today. There's always going to be doubters and naysayers, and I mean, but there's hard evidence, there's hard data, like, yeah, in all of these fields. I mean, the data that climate change, the data that the data science that we have done in the environmental and climate change areas and medical and medicine professions, there's so much more opportunity and like how much we can learn more about the world. Yeah, it's a pretty exciting time to be a data scientist. We're just scratching the circus with the potential and the global impact that we can make with data science. It's been so great having you on theCUBE. Thank you so much, I love. I'm going to take data wins arguments into my personal life. I was actually just a quick anecdote, funny story, I was listening to the radio this morning and there was a commercial from an insurance company. And I guess the joke is it's an argument between two spouses and the voiceover comes in and says, let's watch a replay. And like if only then they got the data that helped the woman win the argument. I will warn you, it doesn't always help fit arguments I have at my hands. Okay, I'm going to keep them in the middle of my mind. Gadry, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for your opportunity. And being a great female that we can look up to. We really appreciate your insight and your time. Thank you. All right, for our guests for Hannah Freitag, I'm Lisa Martin, live at Stanford University, covering women in data science 23. Stick around, our next guest joins us in just a minute. The software and technology industry for over 12 years now. So I've had the opportunity as a marketer to really understand and interact with customers across the entire buyer's journey. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm a host of theCUBE. Being a host on theCUBE has been a dream of mine for the last few years. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff and Dave and John at EMC World a few years ago and got the courage up to say, hey, I'm really interested in this. I love talking with customers. Give me a shot, let me come into the studio and do an interview and see if we can work together. I think where I really impact theCUBE is being a female in technology. We interview a lot of females in tech. We do a lot of women in technology events. And one of the things I've-