R-Ladies Global, a worldwide organisation to promote gender diversity in the R community.

Having programming skills is becoming increasingly important for many geoscientists who wish to make their research as reproducible as it can possibly be. One of the most common languages of choice is the R language for statistical computing.

The R community, as other programming communities, suffers from underrepresentation of women and minority genders (e.g., trans men, non-binary, etc) in every role and area of participation, whether as leaders, package developers, conference speakers, conference participants, educators, or users.

As a diversity initiative, the mission of R-Ladies is to achieve proportionate representation by encouraging, inspiring, and empowering people of genders currently underrepresented in the R community. R-Ladies’ primary focus, therefore, is on supporting underrepresented-gender R enthusiasts to achieve their programming potential, by building a collaborative global network of R leaders, mentors, learners, and developers to facilitate individual and collective progress worldwide.

R-Ladies Global received funding for the first time in 2016, from the R Consortium (r-consortium.org, a Linux Foundation Project) and was quickly promoted to be a top-level project due to “its big commitment within the R community”.

The organization is articulated into ‘chapters’, groups hosting events in cities or remotely, the latter for the benefit of everyone, regardless of geographic location and personal circumstances. To date, R-Ladies fosters the development of 180 chapters organizing more than 2000 events in 50 countries around the world with more than 60,000 members and over 70,000 followers across the various Twitter accounts.

In this presentation, we will illustrate all the activities R-Ladies runs to support minority genders: from meetups (in-person meetings, where individuals can learn about new technologies and algorithms free of charge) to the R-Ladies directory (https://rladies.org/directory/), the abstract reviewers’ network (tinyurl.com/rladiesrevs), the Slack channels, the mentorship program, and much more.