 Live from Stanford University, it's theCUBE. Covering Stanford Women in Data Science 2020. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare, and we're live at Stanford University, covering WIDS, Women in Data Science Conference 2020. And this is the fifth annual one. Joining us today is John Hoger, who is the Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft. John, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about your role at Microsoft. I manage a central data science team for Microsoft 365. And tell us more about what you do on a daily basis. Yeah, so we look at, across all the different Microsoft 365 products, Office, Windows, security products. It's really trying to drive growth, whether it's trying to provide recommendations to customers, to end users, to drive more engagement with the products that they use every day. And you're also on the WIDS conference planning committee. So tell us about how you joined and how that experience has been like. Yeah, actually, I was at Stanford about a week after the very first conference. And I got talking to Karen, one of the co-organizers of that conference. And I found out that there was only one sponsor that was very first year, which was Walmart Labs. And the more that she talked about it, the more that I wanted to be involved. And I thought that Microsoft really should be a sponsor of this initiative. And so I got details, I went back and Microsoft's been a sponsor ever since. And I've been on the committee trying to help with identifying speakers and reviewing the different speakers that we have each year. And it's amazing just to see how this event has grown over the four years. Yeah, that's awesome. So when you first started, how many people attended in the beginning? So it started off as being this conference with the 400 or so people and just a few other regional events. And so it was live streamed, but just ready to a few universities. And ever since then it's gone with the Woods Ambassadors and people all around the world. Yeah, so now Woods has, is over 60 countries on every continent, except Antarctica as told in the keynote, as well as has 400 plus attendees here and is live streamed. So how do you think Woods has evolved over the years? It's, it's termed from just a conference to a movement. You know, it's, there's all these new regional events that have been set up, you know, every year. And just people coming together and working together. So at Microsoft we're hosting different events. We've had events in Redmond at the head office and then also in New York and Boston and other places as well. So as a, as a data scientist manager for many years at Microsoft, I'm sure you've seen an increase in women taking technical roles. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, and for any sort of company you have to try and provide that environment. And part of that is even from recruiting and showing that you've got a diverse interview loop. And so we make sure that we have women on every set of interviews to be able to really answer the question, you know, what's it like to be a woman on this team? You know, if it's all men, you can't answer that question. And so, you know, that helps as far as really trying you know, encourage more women to come in to some of these STEM roles. And I've now got, I've got a team of 30 data scientists and half of them are women, which is great. That's awesome. So what advice would you give to young professional women who are just coming out of college or who just starting college or interested in the STEM field but maybe think, oh, I don't know if there'll be anyone like me in the room? You know, ask the questions of when you interview them. Like go for those interviews and ask, like say, what's it like to be a woman on the team? And you're really ensuring that the teams that you join in the companies you join in are inclusive and really value diversity in the workforce. And talking about that, as we heard in the opening address that diversity brings more perspectives. It also helps take away bias from data science. How have you noticed that bias becoming more fair, especially at your time at Microsoft? Yeah, and that's what diversity is about. It's just having those diverse set of perspectives and opinions and having more people just looking at the data and thinking through how the data can be used and ensuring it's been used in the right way. Right, and so what are you going forward? Do you plan to still be on the WIDs committee? What do you see WIDs going, how do you see WIDs in five years? Yeah, I love being part of this conference and being on the committee and I just expect it to continue to grow. I think it's just going beyond a conference to also be on the podcast and all the other initiatives that are coming from that. Great, John, thank you so much for being on theCUBE. It was great having you here. Thank you. Thanks for watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare, and stay tuned for more.