Addressing the Gender Gap in the R Project

Heather Turner

and the Women in R Taskforce:

Jenny Bryan, Di Cook, Julie Josse,
Oliver Keyes, Michael Lawrence, Kevin O’Brien,
Alicia Oshlack, Carolin Strobl

October 13, 2016

What gender gap?

Conferences

• At useR! 2016, 28% participants were women

• The percentage of female presenters was higher for lightning (25%) and poster (28%) vs talks (19%)

• In 2015 all above percentages were ~19%

Packages

• 2010 survey of 1087 maintainers of packages on CRAN/Bioconductor plus contributors on R-forge¹
• 9% of package authors were women (95% CI: 7.1 - 11.0%)
• 32.5% were from the USA