Celebrating Power Women in Code, Design & Data
By: Elijah Zarlin
DCFemTech is a coalition aimed at lowering the barrier to entry and increasing career opportunities for women in tech. Tonight, the DCFemTech awards recognize 49 women and non-binary individuals who representing some of the top tech talent in DC.
We’re excited that Mapbox Data Engineer Anna Petrone is one of the honorees. Ahead of tonight’s awards, we asked her to share a bit about her work at Mapbox and her experience working in tech and data.
What do you do at Mapbox?
I began at Mapbox in January 2018 as a member of the Cartography team, working on the OpenStreetMap data ingestion pipeline that powers the Mapbox base maps. Now I am working to bring about the company’s vision of a living map; specifically, I am working on the pipeline that will allow our maps to consume data from a variety of rich data sources.
How did you get your start in tech and data?
I learned python and C++ as part of my university coursework, which was my first introduction to tech. Where I began working with data, and perhaps what made the strongest impact on me, was during my college internship, working for a major health insurance company in their newly-formed informatics department. They had recently built the first company-wide data warehouse that brought into a single location medical claims, billing, prescription information, and reward program membership, as well as data about providers and hospitals. It was an exciting time to be there because the data team that I worked for constantly had to interface with people on the business side, who were interested in problems such as identifying good candidates for the health rewards program based on medical history, or how to provide doctors information on cheaper alternatives to common procedures.
It was there that I saw the power of knowing how to solve difficult technical problems (how can we model all of this data, how can we write more performant queries,) as a means to answer impactful real-world problems. I would credit this experience as the point where I became seriously interested in working with data.
What problems are most interesting to you that maps can help solve?
A problem that I feel strongly about is the ever-increasing traffic congestion faced in many US cities and cities around the world, not only for the harmful effects on the environment but also for making cities less livable and equitable. Maps can be used as a way to assess where traffic is heaviest as well as to learn which geographic areas and income levels are most impacted by lack of access to convenient transportation. By visualizing traffic data alongside demographic data and the location of public transit facilities, you can learn which areas are underserved by transit, and where adding transit might have the biggest impact on reducing traffic. By visualizing this data specifically on a map, the findings are more compelling and can be used to start a meaningful discussion around change. A company who has done amazing work in this regard is Conveyal, whose tools let decision makers quantitatively discuss the impact of proposed policies.
How has your experience been as a woman in tech? What do you think needs to change to bring more women into tech?
It can be hard to have confidence in your own abilities in a workplace with few or no other women, but this starts before one’s professional career. In college, I was a math and economics double major with a minor in physics, so as you can imagine there were many fewer women in my classes than men. In that environment, it is very easy to second-guess yourself and doubt whether you are really cut out for “this type of work.” So it’s super critical to have professors who take you seriously and hold you to the same standard as other students because this provides validation that you are in fact capable of doing the work.
Throughout my academic and professional career, I have had nearly, if not all, male professors and managers. But I have been extremely fortunate in that they’ve been terrific mentors, who have provided this type of validating support for me. Early on, my manager from the health insurance company would constantly challenge me and talk through ideas with me. After graduating I took a research assistant position on an all-male team of economists, where my manager again gave me tons of interesting work and placed a lot of confidence in my abilities, and was very approachable when I needed help understanding something. I mention these experiences because they are likely the exception rather than the rule, and I have also been in situations where women are talked-over or not taken seriously. So of course if you put someone in that environment, who may already be doubting themselves, then they’re more likely to give up or switch to a less-technical track.
So whether it be a professor, manager, or any other person of influence, they should aim to not treat women any differently than their male peers; which is to say listen and debate their ideas, encourage them to take on work that’s out of their comfort zone, and most importantly, give them the same leniency for failure as their male counterparts — failure being something that is celebrated among men but can be damning for women.
Working at Mapbox has been the first time where I’ve had female teammates, and it has certainly made things easier. Of course, there’s still room for improvement, but I love seeing women leading teams and running projects. The more this becomes the norm, the easier it will be for other women to feel like they too belong.
Elijah Zarlin - Brand marketing - Mapbox | LinkedIn
DCFemTech recognizes Mapbox Map Data Engineer Anna Petrone was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.