R-Ladies

R-Ladies is an organization that promotes gender diversity in the community of users of the R statistical programming language.^[1][2][3] It is made up of local chapters affiliated with the worldwide coordinating organization R-Ladies Global.

History

On October 1, 2012, Gabriela de Queiroz, a data scientist, founded R-Ladies in San Francisco (United States) after participating in similar free initiatives through Meetup.^[1][4] In the following four years, three other groups started: Taipei in 2014,^[5] Minneapolis (called “Twin Cities”) in 2015,^[6] and London in 2016.^[1][7] The chapters were independent until the 2016 useR! Conference, where it was agreed to create a central coordinating organization. In that year, Gabriela de Queiroz and Erin LeDell of R-Ladies San Francisco; Chiin-Rui Tan, Alice Daish, Hannah Frick, Rachel Kirkham and Claudia Vitolo of R-Ladies London; as well as Heather Turner joined to apply for a grant from the R Consortium, with which they asked for support for the global expansion of the organization.^[8][9]

In September 2016, with this scholarship, R-Ladies Global was founded and in 2018 it was declared as a high-level project by the R Consortium.^[10] As of 2019, the RLadies Global community consists of 178 groups in 48 countries.^[11]

Organization

R-Ladies meetings are organized around workshops and talks, led by people that identify as female or as gender minorities (including but not limited to cis/trans women, trans men, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, pangender, two-spirt, gender-fluid, neutrois).^[8][12] The organization is coordinated, but decentralized, and new chapters can be founded by anyone using the publicly available “starter-kit”.^[13]

R-Ladies groups aim to promote a culture of inclusion within their events and community.^[14][15] In addition, they promote gender equality and diversity in conferences,^[16][17] in the workplace,^[18][19][20] collaboration among gender minorities,^[21] and analysis of data about women.^[12][20]

R-Ladies also collaborates with other projects, such as NASA Datanauts.^[22][23][16]

Gabriela de Queiroz

Gabriela de Queiroz is a chief data scientist at IBM, the founder of the global R-Ladies and AI Inclusive organizations.^[24][25][26] She was raised in Brazil and received her bachelor's degree in statistics from Rio de Janeiro State University.^[27] She has a master’s in epidemiology at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and another one in statistics at California State University, East Bay.^[27]

de Queiroz moved to the United States in 2012 to begin her master's degree in statistics at California State University, East Bay.^[24] Interested in creating an inclusive space for women learning the programming language R, she began a Meetup group in the San Francisco Bay area.^[24] Since then, the R-Ladies organization has grown to more than 178 groups in 48 countries.

In addition to her work with R-Ladies, de Queiroz is an expert in machine learning and leads IBM's AI Strategy and Innovations team.^[26][28] Her team contributes to projects such as TensorFlow.^[26]

Notable members

• Julia Stewart Lowndes

References

0.00 (0 votes) Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Ladies. Read more