OUR MISSION
The mission of FEM inc. is to serve and empower diverse audiences by understanding the impact of media/entertainment and technology on society. We focus on the intersection of technology, gender and media through innovative research conducted with strategic partners and thought leaders. Our approach centers on human perceptions, motivations and behaviors - “why” people engage with content and the systemic influence of media and technology on culture and society. We apply this mission in the research that we conduct and in the products we develop, including our video AI venture, Prizma, which was acquired by Nielsen Gracenote in May 2018.
OUR EXPERTISE SPANS TECHNOLOGY, BUSINESS STRATEGY, BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND NEUROSCIENCE.
The FEM inc. holding company was founded in 2012 with the key insight that media shapes perceptions and public opinion, often with disproportionately negative effects for certain segments of the population, based on their race and gender.
We believe that media and entertainment can be critical levers for unlocking human potential. The goal of our research is to generate data and insights that create evidence-based solutions for the media/entertainment and technology industries that can help drive positive social outcomes.
OUR RESEARCH
This research was a collaboration between FEM inc. and Google, who sponsored the project. The goal of this study was to take a user-focused approach to understanding the impact of potential gender bias in digital advertisements. We hope these insights provide the basis for a discussion on industry-wide ‘good practices’ and a better understanding of the potential outcomes associated with certain types of advertisements.
The United States is experiencing a huge deficit in properly trained scientists and engineers. At the same time there is a significant gender gap in STEM fields indicating a large untapped reservoir of potential STEM talent. The gender gap in STEM has many causes - here we address the ways in which media contributes to or could be used to combat the "leaky pipeline" for women going into STEM careers.
Women count for over half of the U.S. population, earn nearly 60% of all college degrees, comprise 47% of the American workforce and represent 53% of voters. Although women have broken almost every glass ceiling at least once, they still occupy only 18% of the top leadership positions across all sectors.
THE FOUNDERS
RACHEL PAYNE
Rachel Payne started this venture when she realized that there was an enormous opportunity for advancing AI in Technology and Entertainment. She leads strategic partnerships, business development, investor relations, IP management and all personnel matters. She co-leads Product and Research.
In her prior role as Principal, Global Strategic Alliances at Google, she worked with top executives across the company to develop comprehensive strategies for their largest global media and technology partners, including Sony, Disney, NewsCorp and Time Warner. Rachel served externally as the global point of contact for some of the company’s most important relationships, including Sony. It was in this capacity that she was able to identify a unique opportunity in the entertainment ecosystem to serve to meet a diverse set of user needs for better entertainment experiences. She originally joined Google as a Senior Program Officer on the founding team of Google.org, working closely with the Google founders, C-level executives and board of directors. She later led Google’s international business operations in emerging markets on regional management teams where she helped local teams in developing and emerging markets launch core Google products (Google Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTube in Africa), Android (Latin America) and created Google's first mobile development lab (Africa). She has a BA from Smith College and MBA from Stanford University.
DR. MEGHANA BHATT
Dr. Meghana Bhatt came to this venture after spending ten years in academia studying human decision-making. The main focus of her research has been developing mathematical models of behavior that are based in neuroscience and psychology for a variety of contexts including advertising, learning, and social interactions. She received her A.B. in mathematics from Harvard, and a Ph.D. from Caltech in behavioral and neuroeconomics.
At Prizma, Dr. Bhatt applies her expertise to develop our human-centric approach, psychographic feature space and optimization algorithms. She built and managed a team of data science engineers, external contractors, and interns to implement algorithms at scale. Prizma’s proprietary approach has consistently won in side-by-side trials against a variety industry competitors creating view rates and performance lift ranging from 30% increase up to 2-3X improvement over other solutions. She also supervised the creation of a Media Intelligence API (currently in beta) which cleans, normalizes and aggregates content and usage data from multiple platforms and sources to allow Business Intelligence/Data Science, Marketing and Editorial teams leverage their data and create usable insights.
NATASHA MOHANTY
Natasha Mohanty is Co-Founder and CTO of FEM Inc., leading engineering and product at Prizma AI where she manages cross-functional teams across Engineering, Product, Testing, User Experience and Design as well as overseeing Partner Support. She is responsible for architecting and building Prizma’s serving infrastructure to deliver recommendations with high reliability and low latency supporting different environments and business rules. She also manages Prizma’s customer-facing products and has pushed the envelope on video engagement by building intuitive user experiences that not only deliver but also collect signals needed to drive those experiences.
She comes to this venture from Google, where she led engineering teams across Google Web Search, Google News and Google+. She received her A.B. from Mount Holyoke and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. When not hacking for Prizma, she works on projects to get more women and girls interested in tech.