Pledge 1%'s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Molly Emmett
Data Scientist, Atrium
Denver, Colorado, United States
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
As a data scientist at Atrium, I work with clients to design, build, and productionize models. I also work with a nonprofit to optimize their data definition, capture, and analysis.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
I get to help build Atrium's Cultivate program, which focuses on supporting nonprofits. I became a data scientist in order to deepen my technical skills and bring those skills back to the social impact arena. Thinking about how to render social impact an integral part of the business context is a meaningful way to bridge my previous and current experiences.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years - what motivates you to keep going?
When I feel like I'm running down personally or professionally, I think about my former students. Some of them faced significant hardship, and if they could show up to school with humor and goodwill, I can get up and keep going in their example.
What does generosity mean to you?
Generosity is both personal and structural. In any given interaction, and increasingly so as online interaction is normalized, we only see a fraction of a person. Recognizing that we don't know a person's entire history or even what their day has been like is an important practice of generosity that can be logically extended to encompass structural generosity that does not make presumptions about people and groups in need.
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
One way that businesses can play a larger role in solving social and environmental challenges is by actively listening to the experts in those arenas. Individuals who work directly with people in need or who have been focused on climate change may have deep understanding of the subtleties of these issues. Asking questions of the people who are being served or the people who, for example, farm or otherwise create the product that is being sold is essential to doing relevant good as opposed to strictly intentional good.
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark. I love this song's acknowledgement of sadness and frustration. We've all been confronted with circumstantial uncertainty over the past couple of years, and there's something to be said for openly expressing the arduousness of that and picking yourself and others up in whatever ways you can (...and I love The Boss).
