Keywords: Business analytics
I had the honor of being an organizer of the ISBIS 2017 Conference “Statistics in Business Analytics”, which was held at IBM Research during June of 2017. The purpose of the conference was to bring together researchers in industry and academia to discuss and explore how businesses increase efficiency, support decision-making, improve business operations and ultimately transform their business by using statistics and business analytics. All the organizers and keynote speakers of the conference were women. Moreover, women were mainly invited to be session organizers. This gender bias was done intentionally to ensure that more women were included in the conference program than what is usually observed in similar conferences. In this talk I will share my experience on this women-organized conference and discuss the effects of this criterion on the gender composition of the conference.