Gender Diversity in the R and Python Communities

Many (if not most) tech communities have far more representation from men than from women (and even fewer from nonbinary folk). This is a shame, because everybody uses software, and these projects would self-evidently benefit from the talent and expertise from across the entire community. Some projects are doing better than others, though, and data scientist Reshama Shaikh recently published an in-depth comparison of the representation of women in the R any Python communities.

Shaikh's analysis draws from several data sources, which provide evidence that women are better represented in the R community in the Python community. These include:

• The R-Ladies community has 29,500 members compared to PyLadies' 36,500, despite the Python community being 6x larger overall.
• A 2016 study of GitHub contributors estimates R contributors are 9.3% women, and 2.0% for Python contributors.
• In a 2017 R Consortium survey of R users, 14% of respondents identified as women.
• The 2018 New York R conference had 45% women speakers; the 2016 useR! conference had 28% female attendees. 

Several reasons are offered for the relative success of the R community in this regard, but in my opinion the most important of these is the vibrancy of the R-Ladies network, which now comprises 134 chapters worldwide. Shaikh lists some steps that the Python community are taking to address the issue, and provides several additional suggestions as well. You can read the complete analysis and recommendations in the blog post linked below. 

Reshama Shaikh: Why Women Are Flourishing In R Community But Lagging In Python

Comments

[R]

R gender study of the gender imbalance for registered nurses or teachers please.

Per 2014 NY Times article 80% of elementary school teachers are female, why not use R to report on it?

Dislike seeing ms blogs being used for political purposes or to provide street cred among a progressive set of MS employees.

Accepted fix is to report a gender imbalance in occupation X and an almost opposite gender imbalance in occupation Y in the same blog post article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/sunday-review/why-dont-more-men-go-into-teaching.html

[Sammy]

Please stop including such political posts under MS Developer Tools Blogs.

[David Smith]

There's nothing political about this post.

[useR]

"Many (if not most) tech communities have far more representation from men than from women (and even fewer from nonbinary folk). This is a shame, because everybody uses software, and these projects would self-evidently benefit from the talent and expertise from across the entire community."

Of course it is political.

Also, is the author suggesting that a balanced representation of each group (incl. non-binary) is optimal and that talent is distributed evenly across the three gender groups, even though they differ greatly in size?

[R]

It's political.

Reporting survey/sampling results that agrees with a political agenda is politically promoting that agenda.

It follows the gender X is underrepresented in STEM professions agenda.

Civil discourse allows for this comment and it's publicly acceptable to point out how one idea is repeatedly publicized to the exclusion of a different acceptable idea.

[Ian Fellows]

Thanks for the post David. In my experience this may have a lot to do with the heavy Statistics domain focus of R. When I attend Statistics conferences, the % of women is typically >30%, whereas computer science conferences are typically <15%.

Of course whenever something even vaguely points out discrepancies by gender or race, the reactionaries come out in force. Just saying "Hey, let's make sure we are a welcoming environment to all people, especially those that have been historically excluded," and somehow that is a radical political proposition.

Their negative reactions only highlight the need for more empathy for our fellow humans and more pathways for inclusion among underrepresented groups.

[JR]

Please explain the lack of gender diversity in the nursing occupation.

[R]

Where's the "Hey, lets make sure we are a welcoming environment to all people, especially those that have been historically excluded" from female dominated occupations?

Radical political proposition it's not.

None of the statements here to date condemn promoting an occupation to groups in the minority of the workers in that occupation.

Statements here affirm that many headlines repeat "lack of women in occupation..." but rarely have "lack of men in occupation".

Think imbalance in the headlines and if that imbalance furthers an agenda. Raising a point on headline imbalance is not an attack on any inclusion program. Taking it as an attack on an inclusion program is the knee jerk reaction.

[Madeline]

This post fits right in with the stated purpose of this blog (per the masthead):

"Daily news about using open source R for big data analysis, predictive modeling, data science, and visualization since 2008"

Thanks David!