In the technology field, there is a gender gap that, as time goes by, is getting smaller.
However, there are barriers that still directly affect women and that is the main reason why there are fewer women in the sector.
Below you will find some of the difficulties that we, as women, have to face when we start our quest to fulfill our dream.
Obstacles
The idea of hiring men in the technology area is much more common than seeing women working in this area.
Therefore, the stereotype is difficult to break, due to factors that directly impact the female gender and impede professional development.
In addition to the mentality that women cannot program at the same level as men.
Something that can also be noticed is the salary gap. If we analyze, there are currently many more non-technology careers that pay better than those that focus on ICT.
This factor is not much of an incentive for women to want to pursue a career in IT.
The fact that the environment is quite masculine does not cause any interest and makes it unattractive to women.
The lack of education we receive from an early age on ICT-related topics makes us see this field as something difficult to understand, so there is no interest in studying it.
This area requires constant learning to be at the forefront of new updates, for this reason, it takes time to acquire them. As women with the responsibilities of home and family, it becomes complicated to have enough time to do it.
Women Challeng
As a society, while we can provide the same learning opportunities, we must also provide the same opportunities for work and growth within it.
To create an environment with values that help the inclusion of women in technology.
If you are a woman, and you are still afraid to get involved in ICT, I invite you to give it a try, and you will make a difference.
Nowadays, it is very common to see more men than women in web development positions. Now, I am going to explain some reasons why it is significant to have a female presence in the area.
According to statista.com, in its latest survey on “Gender distribution of software developers worldwide”, 91.67% are men and only 5.31% are women. This means that there is quite a considerable gap between the two genders. This fact is even more noticeable at University, since in careers that are ICT oriented, the percentage of women enrolled is very low compared to men.
Reasons why we need more women in the web development field:
The creativity that women have helps to generate innovation in terms of software creation and design. Although it should be clarified that the skills that both women and men possess are the same, only the female skills need to be exploited even more.
The lack of representation in the area means that more and more men are taking power over it, and this is a direct consequence of the disinterest of young women in studying a career oriented to development. Therefore, getting more involved in this area will help inspire many others to lose the fear of leading, designing, planning and executing high-impact web development projects.
The combination of genders will help to have a better perspective of the solutions that can be implemented, either by the different experiences that both parties bring or by the perspective that each one has. In addition to improving the work area in terms of work environment.
You do not have to stereotype this area and leave it only for men. Let go of the fear that you are capable of developing yourself professionally, and you will achieve success.
Now is the time to share with you what I learned during the visualization training at Tableau Public. This being, a reference to what the environment looks like from a beginner’s perspective.
To begin, I will define for you what Tableau Public is as a workspace.
What is Tableau Public?
It is a desktop software specialized in visualizations, which makes presenting data in a certain way easier, due to the variety of integrated graphics that it has, since they are of quality and help the visualizers to be able to interact with them.
It allows incorporating the data source in simple Excel files or other sources, which is quite accessible.
The main objective of this tool is that you can answer questions with the data you have and that at the end of this it becomes a story that tells itself.
Calculated fields
On the other hand, if at any time your data source does not include all the fields that you would like to show in order to tell your story, tableau allows you to create them and is what is known as calculated fields, which consists of creating new fields from calculations with the software’s own functions or basic mathematical functions, to later be saved as any other field in the data source.
For example:
You have a data source with the monthly income and expenses of a business, and this only includes the monthly gross profit and for you it is necessary to know what the monthly net profit they have is to demonstrate through graphs the growth they are having as a company . So, you need to create a calculated field where you get that value.
Therefore, the calculated field would look like this:
So, Net Profit would be a new field of the source that you can use in any other sheet that you need.
And this is a great advantage that Tableau provides you when you need fields that are necessary in your data source to show your visualization with complete and truthful information.
Graphics
There are different graphs that you can use according to the data you are presenting, at some point I came across a tableau recommendation that is to be able to choose very well the graphs that you will use to present the information, since the way they look varies. and the data is better understood.
Based on the previous example, it is not the same to show the growth of the company’s net profit in a simple table with monthly values, to show them in a bar chart where the increase or decrease in profits is clearly seen.
This with practice has helped me a lot and I hope you take it into account to make your visualizations more understandable.
Another point that is quite noticeable is that tableau only enables you the possible graphics that you can use, and selects the one that best suits the representation of the relationship of the fields in an orange box.
Work space
It is quite accessible in terms of the management of the marks it provides, since it allows you to add a bit of design to your fields when you add them to the white space, it is quite useful to be able to make sense of your final graphic because you can play with shapes , colors, sizes or the labels you want to show as information. Apart from that many times they are necessary to understand your graph and I explain why with an example.
When you add a map graph, the “color” mark will help you to distinguish the greatest value from the sum of your data, you only have to pay attention to the colors you use to differentiate where the greatest value is concentrated. Besides that, if “marks” is on automatic, it means that it will recommend a graph that best suits your fields.
When I started to create my first visualization I thought that everything was going to be more complicated than I imagined, but like any other new knowledge, everything begins without knowing anything and the most effective way I found to start with this was to look for examples of visualizations in which I could be inspired.
I will leave you some of them so that you too will be inspired:
In addition to these, you can look for more inspirations in the Tableau gallery, there they provide you with many more and although not all of them can be done due to the limited graphics that Tablea Public has integrated, they will inspire you like me.
I hope I could have encouraged you to start creating short stories using these visualizations in Tableau Public. I recommend that you start by testing the #MakeOverMonday datasets.
In Latin America there are very few people who are dedicated to visualizing data, therefore, the visualizations that we find are mostly made by Europeans.
Now, that does not mean that part of us Latin Americans does not call our attention to the world of data processing, everything is in finding the motivation to see the need to share useful information to society, which helps them to analyze the environment in which they are being developed or simply relevant information on a topic of your particular taste.
There is a DSSG (Data Science for Social Good) scholarship program that focuses directly on this, where what is sought is to help non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations to get better results from their information, this it is accomplished with top-tier fellowship participants who are selected to work with data scientists and public interest groups on research projects.
Currently, we are implementing a project called #UnplugDataChallenge that consists of training a person, in order to learn about visualizations in the Tableau Public environment with already processed datasets from the #MakeOverMonday social data science movement.
Tableau Public is a data visualization software, which allows us users to make interactive and good quality graphics, it has a wide range of effective ways to order and present data. Once the visualizations are finished, they are uploaded directly to the online profile that we previously created, where they can then be shared on social networks or in any other medium. They will also be viewable by the Tableau author community.
The idea for which we use this tool is to facilitate training in visualizations, since Tableau allows us to incorporate the information in simple Excel files or other data sources, which is more accessible, in addition to that, it is a good ally for the interpretation of data through its graphs and its use is quite understandable. For reference, this software is positioned as one of the best, for being quite intuitive but complete in terms of operation for someone who is just starting out in this.
Make Over Monday is a Data Science movement for social good and focuses on presenting different perspectives of how people visualize data. The sets are published every week on their website.
#MakeOverMonday has made our work easier, since their data sets are processed and we can only understand them and then use them, also, the topics they use are quite relevant to the community but as we have mentioned before, this movement is European by which, all their data is focused on those countries and not on Latin Americans. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t get the best out of it.
For this reason, we challenge the learner to turn that data into useful information for Latinos. With this we are achieving that there are visualizations in Spanish that can be understood and can be useful.
Nowadays, society needs to stay informed and what better way than this to do it, and if we can question data from Europe, we will do so to contribute knowledge to the Latin American community.
Have we gotten them interested in interacting with these two great allies?
We encourage you to find out more about the Tableau Public environment and have fun creating and designing short stories that are useful to the entire community.
When writing an article for our Blog, we must take into account the factors that directly affect its positioning and thus be able to treat them.
Keywords
When it comes to writing an article, we must first do a quick search for the topic to be written, this in order to observe how visitors search for it and thus discover the keywords they use and guide us through them, to achieve that our topic shows up in the SERPs and is competitive.
But it must be clear that the excessive use of these words is not the right thing for our users, because no one would like that every 10 words the same thing is repeated, this will cause a tired and little understandable reading, in addition to how tedious it can to become. We should always write for people and not for Google crawlers.
Although the keywords have to be included in the title and description, we try to make their use in a subtle and striking way, respecting the use of some tags such as H1 for title and H3 for subtitle, since it will help easier positioning.
Organization
The structure of an article is a very important for its understanding. We simply have to know how to order it and how far to cut it, to generate short paragraphs that have a main idea to convey. It is useless to make large paragraphs if at the end it is not clear what you want to share or it is useless to make them short if the idea is not transmitted well. There is not a number of lines that can define a paragraph, nor a number of paragraphs that can define an article, but we must consider the value of the information we want to give.
The parts that we are going to define as the structure for the articles are:
Title: It must be clear and eye-catching, causing curiosity in the reader. Respecting that it fulfills the promise of content.
For example:
How to increase the percentage of web traffic to 50%?
5 incredible tips to master SEO.
Introduction: We present information that captures attention according to the topic, in this case we can vary the content in different ways to start.
For example:
One question: Do we usually change the default view settings in
Google Analytics? We should know that …
An analogy: Using the default view in Google Analytics is like handling
an automatic car, we will never make changes.
A quote: “A good practice is to create 3 basic views and 3 custom views of
according to the needs that arise. “As Albeiro Ochoa affirms
A statistic: 7 out of 10 users only use the default view of
Google Analytics to save information.
A controversial or controversial phrase: Use only the default Google view
Analytics is not that great. Unlike what some people think …
Content: We start the thread of what we want to transmit, it has to be clear and not redundant, taking care to maintain the interest of the reader.
Conclusion and closure: We make a summary of the topic, focused on the main idea to establish what was said before.
Non-redundant content
Sometimes, there are synonyms of words that we can use to express and create a pleasant reading, this in order to avoid falling into redundancy, and always keep in mind that not all synonyms can be used for what we want to convey. Sometimes they will just make a confusing read.
Quantity will never be better than quality, therefore, we always try to get to the main idea without much detouring and although the exact number of words for an article is not known, it is recommended that ours have a minimum of 300 and a maximum of 1300, keeping the reading below 7 minutes.
Pictures
Most of the time, people associate content better with the use of illustrative images, therefore, we recommend using them within the content as long as they are of good quality and preferably their own, otherwise grant credits. We must take care of their weight so as not to generate a slow page load and we have to know how to measure well how many are useful to accompany the text, because an article where they find more images than text does not make sense. Everything is about a balance where what we are looking for is a plus in content.
Social networks
At the end of our article, we must place the icons of social networks so that it is easier to share it. This in order to motivate readers to spread the content strategically.
TOOLS
There are tools that will help us check the quality of our article and the points mentioned above.
READ-O-METER: It helps us to know the number of words in the article and calculates the reading time for it. It is quite useful so that we always keep in mind that it does not exceed the recommended number of words of 300 minimum and 1300 maximum, and that we keep the reading below 7 minutes preferably.
https://niram.org/read/
LANGUAGE TOOL: It is our friend tool, since its objective is to correct our spelling errors, in addition, its advantage is being a Chrome extension, therefore, we can make use of it simultaneously when we write our article online.
https://languagetool.org/es/
ONLINE SYNONYMS: Said before, using synonyms of the words in the article is very important so that we are not redundant. That is why we will make use of this tool which provides us with the synonyms in different contexts that in the end is what we are looking for to write with quality and coherence.
https://www.sinonimosonline.com/
In conclusion, if we put these points and recommendations into practice, we will make our readers interested in our articles already published and to be published. In addition to helping Google crawlers to position them more easily.
