On 11/25/2014 04:11 AM, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.gos...@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.bla...@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@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@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.
--
Computational Biology / Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N.
PO Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109
Location: Arnold Building M1 B861
Phone: (206) 667-2793
______________________________________________
R-help@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.
