Jennifer Prendki found her voice. Self-described as soft-spoken, the current chief data scientist at Atlassian Pty Ltd faces the challenges of going against the flow of established processes and speaking up in male-dominated meetings.

“It’s typical for people, like a head of data science, female data scientists, to be in a situation where they are perceived as being maybe a little bit aggressive or a little bit pushy, and you sometimes fall into this old saying: ‘He’s the boss; she’s bossy,’ kind of thing, and that is a challenge,” said Prendki (pictured).

This position drove her passion in data sciences. Atlassian asks employees to deploy their own models, Prendki explained. Her technical knowledge was strong, but she was looking for confidence in speaking to large audiences.

Prendki sat down with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Global Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford University. They discussed women in data sciences and the power of self-confidence.

Thought leadership

Last summer when Prendki joined Atlassian’s data science team, she was the only person in applied math, while everybody else had a computer science background.

“I quickly realized that I’m the only person who is really trained to push for ‘let’s validate our models really properly,’ etc.,” Prendki said. “I actually believe that getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is definitely something that data science is about, because you have new technologies, new models; you have lateral moves.”

In just under six months, Prendki grew her team from three to 15 data scientists across three locations: Mountain View, San Francisco and Sydney.

In her own journey, Prendki moved from the advertising industry before switching to e-commerce and finally to the software services industry. Today, speaking at conferences like WiDS has helped her presentation skills. She is now training other women on her team to deliver technical speeches at conferences too.

Just being able to make a conscious effort to carry a technical role and to build trust will help a woman step up into a thought leadership role, according to Prendki. “I think that people tend to forget that the real diversity is diversity of thought,” she concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s much more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of the Global Women in Data Science Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Women in Data Science Conference. Stanford University, the event sponsor and other sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE