R-Ladies is an organization that promotes

gender diversity Gender diversity is equitable or fair representation of people of different genders. It most commonly refers to an equitable ratio of men and women, but may also include people of non-binary genders. Gender diversity on corporate boards has be ...

in the community of users of the R statistical programming language. 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 San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

(United States) after participating in similar free initiatives through

Meetup Meetup is a social media platform for hosting and organizing in-person and virtual activities, gatherings, and events for people and communities of similar interests, hobbies, and professions. It was founded in 2002 by Scott Heiferman and four ot ...

. In the following four years, three other groups started: Taipei in 2014,

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

(called “Twin Cities”) in 2015, and London in 2016. 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. 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. As of 2019, the RLadies Global community consists of 178 groups in 48 countries.

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). The organization is coordinated, but decentralized, and new chapters can be founded by anyone using the publicly available “starter-kit”. R-Ladies groups aim to promote a culture of inclusion within their events and community. In addition, they promote

gender equality Gender equality, also known as sexual equality or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation and decision-making; and the state of valuing d ...

and diversity in conferences, in the workplace, collaboration among gender minorities, and analysis of data about women. R-Ladies also collaborates with other projects, such as

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Datanauts.

Gabriela de Queiroz

Gabriela de Queiroz is a chief data scientist at IBM, the founder of the global R-Ladies and AI Inclusive organizations. She was raised in

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

and received her bachelor's degree in statistics from Rio de Janeiro State University. She has a master’s in epidemiology at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and another one in statistics at California State University, East Bay. de Queiroz moved to the United States in 2012 to begin her master's degree in statistics at

California State University, East Bay California State University, East Bay (Cal State East Bay, CSU East Bay, or CSUEB) is a public university in Hayward, California. The university is part of the 23-campus California State University system and offers 136 undergraduate and 60 pos ...

. Interested in creating an inclusive space for women learning the programming language R, she began a

group in the San Francisco Bay area. 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 Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and leads IBM's AI Strategy and Innovations team. Her team contributes to projects such as

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...

Notable members

References

{{Authority control Women in computing R (programming language)