Gender balance in R

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com> wrote:

I took a look at apparent gender among list participants a few years ago:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2011-June/280272.html

Same general thing: very few regular participants on the list were
women. I don't see any sign that that has changed in the last three
years. The bar to participation in the R-help list is much, much lower
than that to become a developer.

I plotted the gender of posters on r-help over time. The plot is here:
https://twitter.com/scottkosty/status/449933971644633088

The code to reproduce that plot is here:
https://github.com/scottkosty/genderAnalysis
The R file there will call devtools::install_github to install a
package from Github used for guessing the gender based on the first
name (https://github.com/scottkosty/gender).

Note also on that tweet that Gabriela de Queiroz posted it, who is the
founder of R-ladies; and that David Smith showed interest in
discussing the topic. So there is definitely demand for some data
analysis and discussion on the topic.

It would be interesting to look at the stats for CRAN packages as well.

The very low percentage of regular female participants is one of the
things that keeps me active on this list: to demonstrate that it's not
only men who use R and participate in the community.

Thank you for that!

Scott


--
Scott Kostyshak
Economics PhD Candidate
Princeton University

(If you decide to do the stats for 2014, be aware that I've been out
on medical leave for the past two months, so the numbers are even
lower than usual.)

Sarah

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 10:10 AM, Maarten Blaauw
<maarten.blaauw at qub.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi there,

I can't help to notice that the gender balance among R developers and
ordinary members is extremely skewed (as it is with open source software in
general).

Have a look at http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html - at most
a handful of women are listed among the 'supporting members', and none at
all among the 29 'ordinary members'.

On the other hand I personally know many happy R users of both genders.

My questions are thus: Should R developers (and users) be worried that the
'other half' is excluded? If so, how could female R users/developers be
persuaded to become more visible (e.g. added as supporting or ordinary
members)?

Thanks,

Maarten

--
Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org