[R] Gender balance in R

[Martin Morgan]

On 11/25/2014 04:11 AM, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
> 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).

It would be great to include in your package the script that scraped author 
names from R-help archives (I guess that's what you did?). Presumably it easily 
applies to other mailing lists hosted at the same location (R-devel, further 
along the ladder from user to developer, and Bioconductor / Bioc-devel, in a 
different domain and perhaps confounded with a different 'feel' to the list). 
Also the R community is definitely international, so finding more versatile 
gender-assignment approaches seems important.

it might be interesting to ask about participation in mailing list forums versus 
other, and in particular the recent Bioconductor transition from mailing list to 
'StackOverflow' style support forum (https://support.bioconductor.org) -- on the 
one hand the 'gamification' elements might seem to only entrench male 
participation, while on the other we have already seen increased (quantifiable) 
and broader (subjective) participation from the Bioconductor community. I'd be 
happy to make support site usage data available, and am interested in 
collaborating in an academically well-founded analysis of this data; any 
interested parties please feel free to contact me off-list.

Martin Morgan
Bioconductor

>
> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>


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