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A grid of 12 women scientists who were asked what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community
As International Women's Day approached, we asked women scientists from research areas across the company what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community.
Credit: Glynis Condon
Sustainability

How to forge a more gender-equal science community

International Women's Day is March 8 with the theme: #ChooseToChallenge.

By Staff writer
March 4, 2021
9 min read
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International Women’s Day (IWD) is March 8, 2021. The day celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, and also denotes a call to action to accelerate gender parity. This year’s theme: #ChooseToChallenge.

International Women's Day logo

“From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge,” says the IWD website.

As IWD approached, Amazon Science asked women scientists from research areas across the company what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community. Below are their responses.

Bouchra Bouqata

Bouchra is a senior applied scientist within Amazon Robotics. She earned her PhD in machine learning and artificial intelligence from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Bouchra Bouqata
Bouchra Bouqata

  • Provide a clear pipeline for advancing and promoting women’s careers in science. Companies and institutions should adopt gender-balanced peer review promotion processes and committees.  They should also provide special funds and grants to help women scientists further their research and work.
  • Conferences and publishing venues should adopt gender-conscious peer-review committee, and speaker- selection committee recruitment processes.
  • Companies and institutions should commit to educating everyone, not just leadership, to combat the issues facing women in science. They should provide gender awareness training as a standard component of any training they provide to their employees and members. They should provide seminars and convene roundtable discussions on gender issues in science to facilitate communication and identification of solutions.

Nilay Noyan Bulbul

Nilay is a principal scientist within the company’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies organization.  She earned her PhD in operations research from Rutgers University.

Nilay Noyan Bulbul
Nilay Noyan Bulbul

  • Call the gender disparity out: Identify where women scientists are marginalized, and call out the disparity to ensure fair representation at the leadership of scientific research and decision-making, as well as “invite-only” prestigious roles, such as keynote speaking engagements, prize juries, and journal editorial board memberships.
  • Invest in the future: Create more initiatives and opportunities for the next generation of women scientists via mentoring and targeted prize and research fund calls.
  • Keep everyone accountable: Make sure every entity working towards gender equality in science community has a tangible way to measure the “change” and keep track of the progress, and make the process transparent.”

Cindy Cui

Cindy is a senior economist within the Alexa Shopping organization. She earned her PhD in economics from the University of Texas at Austin.  

Cindy Cui
Cindy Cui

Role models, aspirations, and supportive community are most important factors to me. Growing up, my grandma taught me reading and math. I still remember the days when we would go through math problems and I felt happy and proud when I solved them correctly.

My grandma is also one of the few female teachers in her generation and always emphasizes the importance of education and hard work. In school, many smart female classmates encouraged and challenged me throughout.

It takes all of us to improve gender equality in science, doing our best and helping others along the way.

Donna Dodson

Donna is a senior principal technologist within the AWS Security organization. She earned her master’s degree in computer science from Hood College.

Donna Dodson
Donna Dodson

  • Build a culture that values deep thinkers who balance speaking and listening to others. Often the subculture’s voices — including women’s — are not heard.
  • Create compensation, incentives, benefits, resources, recognition and a flexible workplace that balance needs at different stages in life. Early- and mid-career scientists with families require flexibility for a work-life balance.
  • Recognize and promote diverse voices throughout K-12 science programs to empower girls to grow their confidence in science knowledge, skills and abilities

Maryam Fazel-Zarandi

Maryam is a senior machine learning scientist within the Alexa AI organization. She earned her PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto.

Maryam Fazel-zarandi
Maryam Fazel-Zarandi
Credit: Pierce Harman Photography

I have been able to pursue my dream of becoming a scientist and have had access to role models and mentors throughout my education and career. The number of women scientists like me has increased over the past decades, however, we are still far from a gender equal science community.

While we should continue to reduce the large gap that still exists in terms of numbers, in my opinion, we should put more focus on mechanisms to retain women scientists. Lack of support for women in difficulty, feelings of isolation at work, and unmet expectations are among the top reasons why women leave their careers in science. The COVID-19 pandemic has further contributed to these difficulties as more women are taking additional caregiver roles at home, which in turn impacts their continued employment and career advancement.

To forge a more gender-equal global science community, we need to promote women’s integration in the research environment and workplace by learning about women’s experiences and providing direct support for women in difficulty. Our institutions and organizations should also implement and monitor measures to ensure womens’ career development in a post-pandemic world.

Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Rashmi is a senior research scientist within the AWS organization. She earned her PhD in information technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Rashmi Gangadharaiah
Rashmi Gangadharaiah

As a woman and a mother of two girls, I’m glad that gender equality has been receiving more attention. Just talking about gender equality doesn’t mean that we’ve created a gender-equal community. Here are three steps that we can take to create a gender-equal global science community.

  1. Create opportunities that encourage more women to tackle challenging projects.
  2. Recognize women who have an impact on projects and give credit where it’s due.
  3. We as women should not be afraid to take on challenging projects, grab opportunities that come our way and have a community/support system when the deck is stacked against us.

Antia Lamas-Linares

Antia is a principal research scientist within the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. She earned her PhD in physics from the University of Oxford.

Antia Lamas-linares
Antia Lamas-Linares

Helping diversify science is often not about actions within science, but immediately around science; removing the “death by a thousand cuts” problems.

The most impactful action we can take to improve science careers for women is to prioritize affordable childcare in research campuses (both university and industrial). This also has the very nice feature of benefiting the whole community of researchers, but it would have a disproportionate effect on women, while avoiding the insidious problems of preferential treatment.

If we can make space in campuses for exercise and culture, we can make space for daycares. A second thing we could do is prominently feature female scientists without remarking on their gender, they should not be an anomaly that needs to be highlighted and this narrative can be gently pushed from within organizations. Thirdly, and this is more of a personal action, actively avoid discouraging girls for pursuing geeky interests. Boys get rewarded with questions and attention for this behavior. Girls get the opposite signals.

Bilan Liu

Bilan is an applied robotics scientist within the company’s Lab126 organization. She earned her PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

Bilan Liu
Bilan Liu

  • The key aspect for a gender equal world is an environment where women share the same opportunities as men, such as quality education.
  • A gender equal world not only calls for the equality of women, but also quality among women. It is beneficial to share the recognition of successful women, as well as to have supportive peers and mentors for young women.
  • We should advocate to elevate women’s voices, both in the workplace and the media. Increasing the representation of women in a workplace not only creates a better workplace, it also changes perceptions about the value that women bring to the table.

Catherine Benoit Norris

Catherine is a science researcher within the company’s Sustainability organization.  She earned her PhD in business administration from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Catherine Benoit Norris
Catherine Benoit Norris

  • Acknowledge and support workers, students, professionals, and scientists as parents. Until we fully recognize the needs of families, and have a work culture that allows setting limits, women will continue to be held back.
  • Make sure that everyone speaks and are listened to in meetings. Making sure that everybody is being heard and are being paid attention to when they speak is fundamental for a gender-equal global science community.
  • Support, encourage, value, and recognize women academic achievements. Publicly valuing, rewarding, and celebrating competence and achievements in women is a stepping stone towards gender equality in science and beyond.

Tara Taghavi

Tara is a senior applied scientist within the Alexa AI organization. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tara Taghavi
Tara Taghavi

A first step in promoting gender equality is to involve more women in hiring processes, particularly hiring loops for science roles.

A second step is to facilitate a more favorable work environment for mothers by providing alternate hours, a reduced time schedule, and similar measures so women can grow their careers as they grow their families.

A third step is to empower women to take management roles. Many statistics have been shared regarding the disproportionate number of women who are promoted in comparison to their male counterparts. We should address it by encouraging women to pursue these roles, and then supporting them as they take on the responsibilities of these higher-level roles.

Nedelina Teneva

Nedelina is an applied scientist (search) within the Alexa organization. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Chicago.

Nedelina Teneva
Nedelina Teneva

Engaging in cross-disciplinary collaborations forces us to be curious, empowers us to say “I don’t know” and ask others “What do you think?”. 

This helps us better understand others’ lived experiences. In both professional and personal collaborations, we need to apply more rigorously the scientific method, which minimizes the influence of prejudice, by recognizing our biases or pre-existing beliefs and designing appropriate management strategies.

Finally, we need to continue to solidify these processes into platforms and organizations that nurture diverse opinions. Lessons learned from the existing diversity/inclusion efforts within the science community should be utilized in the broader society. 

Nikhita Vedula

Nikhita is an applied scientist with the Alexa Shopping organization. She earned her PhD in computer science and engineering from Ohio State University.

Nikita Vedula
Nikhita Vedula

Education, encouragement, and awareness are key to fostering the growth of a more gender-equal science community.  Throughout my studies — straight through the completion of my PhD — I have seen at best an 80-20 ratio of men to women in classrooms, and academic or industrial positions. This needs to change, and this change needs to begin within our homes.    

Women require support from both men and other women alike, right from their childhood. We need to inspire and motivate women to nurture their dreams, and pursue their unique passions, instead of telling them things like “This field is for men, not for you”.

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AI assistants are getting genuinely good at remembering individuals: your preferences, your projects, the thread you left open last week. But that memory stops at the edge of one person's usage. It doesn't reach the level at which real work happens, where the knowledge that matters is spread across many people, where one person's decision changes what everyone else should do next, and where nobody has the full picture. We're building AI that operates at that level: a durable, accurate understanding of how a team works, used to make that team measurably faster. We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of that work. This is a broad, ambiguous, high-leverage charter. The problems span knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, retrieval, agentic behavior, and the measurement science needed to know whether any of it is working. You will not be handed a well-posed problem. You will decide which problems are worth posing. This is a science leadership role, not a solo research role. You will set direction and raise the scientific bar across a team of applied scientists and MLEs, while staying deep enough in the work to prototype an idea yourself and prove it on real data. Key job responsibilities Own the scientific strategy for how organizational knowledge is represented, kept current, and retrieved: extraction, entity resolution, deduplication, graph structure, and retrieval that unifies graph, semantic, keyword, and temporal search. Advance temporal reasoning. Knowledge changes: facts are revised, decisions are reversed, priorities move. Representing what superseded what and when, and preserving the provenance to distinguish confirmed information from inferred information, is among the hardest open problems in this space. Define the science of proactive behavior. When is it right for an AI system to interrupt a human? These are precision-critical problems where a false positive costs far more than a miss, and where the right threshold varies by team and by individual. Lead our measurement science. Build evaluation for completeness and correctness across a multi-component agentic system, converging on a small number of trustworthy primary metrics rather than a sprawl of component scores. Judge honestly when an offline gain is real and when it is an artifact of a sparse dataset. Build the data that doesn't exist. The most valuable phenomena in this domain are also the rarest, which makes naturally occurring examples too scarce to learn from. Design synthetic and simulated data pipelines that generate controlled, realistic scenarios so these capabilities can be developed and tested at all. Own the learning loop. Turn human interaction into usable training signal, and set the direction for how the system improves from explicit feedback in the near term and from passive observation over the longer term. Make the efficiency calls. Decide where frontier models are required and where a smaller domain-tuned model is sufficient, and build the cost and capacity measurement that makes it a data-driven decision rather than an opinion. Raise the bar across the team. Mentor scientists, review designs, publish where the work merits it, and represent the science externally to customers and to the research community. A day in the life You might spend the morning in a design review arguing that a proposed approach won't survive contact with real data, the afternoon writing a prototype yourself to demonstrate the alternative, and the end of the day convincing an engineer that the capability is worth a sprint. Our sequencing is deliberate: try the idea on intuition, validate it on real data by inspection, then measure it, then operationalize it. Scientists here are expected to identify a problem, justify it, recruit others to it, and drive it into production, across whatever parts of the system that requires. Ownership follows the problem, not the org chart. About the team We are a combined science, product, and engineering team building one product together. Scientists own capabilities end to end rather than individual components, because these problems don't decompose cleanly: a single improvement typically touches extraction, storage, and retrieval at once. We invest in the tooling that makes that practical: local full-stack environments and sandboxed realistic data, so a scientist can go from idea to result in seconds rather than waiting on a deployment or on engineering support. The work is grounded in real usage rather than benchmarks alone, which is a rare combination for science this early: real users, real data, real feedback, and a genuinely unsolved research agenda.
Sr. Applied Scientist, Last Mile Science
IN, KA, Bangalore
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? If so, the WW Amazon Logistics, Business Analytics team is for you. We manage the delivery of tens of millions of products every week to Amazon’s customers, achieving on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner. We are looking for an enthusiastic, customer obsessed, Sr. Applied Scientist with good analytical skills to help manage projects and operations, implement scheduling solutions, improve metrics, and develop scalable processes and tools. The primary role of an Operations Research Scientist within Amazon is to address business challenges through building a compelling case, and using data to influence change across the organization. This individual will be given responsibility on their first day to own those business challenges and the autonomy to think strategically and make data driven decisions. Decisions and tools made in this role will have significant impact to the customer experience, as it will have a major impact on how the final phase of delivery is done at Amazon. Ideal candidates will be a high potential, strategic and analytic graduate with a PhD in (Operations Research, Statistics, Engineering, and Supply Chain) ready for challenging opportunities in the core of our world class operations space. Great candidates have a history of operations research, and the ability to use data and research to make changes. This role requires robust program management skills and research science skills in order to act on research outcomes. This individual will need to be able to work with a team, but also be comfortable making decisions independently, in what is often times an ambiguous environment. Responsibilities may include: - Develop input and assumptions based preexisting models to estimate the costs and savings opportunities associated with varying levels of network growth and operations - Creating metrics to measure business performance, identify root causes and trends, and prescribe action plans - Managing multiple projects simultaneously - Working with technology teams and product managers to develop new tools and systems to support the growth of the business - Communicating with and supporting various internal stakeholders and external audiences
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