R-Ladies chapters in Australia

As we mentioned before, the R-Ladies Melb chapter was founded as the first R-Ladies chapter in Australia in Sep 2016. We are glad that today, there are five more chapters in Australia, including:

Over the last three years, the R-Ladies Melb has had growing number of members, and today we are glad to have close to 1400 members in our local community; this shows the existing need for an inclusive group for women and people of minority genders in the R community. The R-Ladies Melb had an amazing year in 2019; not only we registered the R-Ladies Melb as an incorporation, but also we received the Kellaway Excellence for Education Award from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), hosted amazing speakers such as Alison and Hadley from RStudio and Melina from the editorial board of rOpensSci, and contributed in teaching to high school girls. Below are the highlights of R-Ladies Melb in 2019!

R-Ladies Melb is now a registered not-for-profit!

As briefly mentioned before, we started to learn about how to become an incoporated association over the last few months of 2018. Several members of the team started reading about this and collecting information, specifically Anna Quaglieri, Lucy Liu and myself. Finally, in a lovely afternoon on the 29th of March, Lucy and I registered the R-Ladies Melb Inc through myCAV for incorporated association. This required us to define official roles, such as president, vice-president, treasurer and secretary. Then, we started learning how to open a bank account for incorporation and how to spend expenses and keep track of them more formally. A lot of these were done by Adele Barugahare who became our treasurer and Marie Trussart, who was selected as vice-president in mid 2019 after our initial vice-president, Nikki Rubinstein, stepped down from that role due to other committment. Goknur Giner agreed to become the secretary after our intial secretary, Lucy, left Australia in May 2019; finally, I took the role of president.

Certificate of R-Ladies Melb Inc

Education award from WEHI

We are thrilled to be have been nominated for the Kellaway Excellence Award for Education by Gordon Smyth from WEHI, and very honored to have received this group award in Dec 2019. This is perhaps the first time that all the efforts of R-Ladies Melb have been officially recognised by an institute, and it feels incredibly great to have the support from the Bioinformatics co-division head and the director of WEHI, Doug Hilton.

Receiving the Kellaway Excellence Award for Education from WEHI

Directly from the RStudio: Alison and Hadley

This year, we were lucky to have two speakers from the RStudio: Alison Hill in Sep and Hadley Wickham in Nov 2019. Alison showed us how to take a sad plot and make it better! She gave an example of her work on a book and how she could make the same figure better and better every time! All of the attendees of that night also said a ‘hi’ to Alison’s little daughter on the video recorded by her!

The R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Alison Hill

Di Cook has always supported the R-Ladies Melb team all along the way. In mid 2019, she informed us about Hadley’s visit to Melbourne later in the year. This allowed us to get in touch with Hadley and invite him straight away! Hadley’s talk focused on designing data science. Perhaps it is not surprising that this event is the biggest event the R-Ladies Melb has organised to date. We had about 130 attendees and many people in the waiting list. That is why we live-streamed the event so that other people could join us too. We owe this to the amazing Eike Germann from Eliiza, who helped us with filming the event and streaming it live to our Youtube channel.

The R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Hadley Wickham

Live streaming this event was extremely useful, and we had local and international people who could join us. Hadley not only covered materials related to the data science and importance of design, but also emphasized that people learn better through making mistakes and in a supportive environment. It was also fantastic to hear that he has given many talks at different R-Ladies groups around the world and that he believes the R-Ladies have made a supportive and friendly environment for people to learn. You can still watch his talk on our Youtube. As we had so many people attending this event, we asked them to bring their own cup to minimise the waste.

Tweets summarising the R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Hadley

Encouraging high school girls to code in R

We were invited to participate in the “It takes a spark” conference organized by Spark EDU in Sep 2019. This conference program is intended for both teachers and students to raise awareness and interest of high-school girls and connect with inspiring female role models. We organized a workshop on solving an outbreak using data analysis and programming skills. Our goal was to empower high school girls and their teachers to learn how to code in R and solve a disease outbreak. It was a great success as our workshop was booked out and it was a really rewarding experience that we thoroughly enjoyed. Special thanks to the enthusiasm of the students to learn and solve all the exercises. This workshop was prepared by Marie and Shazia, and was helped by Sehrish, Shanmathi and myself. We hope this workshop inspired many girls and contributed to overcome the bias in the low rate of female participation in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) education and STEAM careers.

It Takes a Spark conference for girls in STEAM

Co-founder of R-Ladies Melb and the R-Ladies Melb 3rd anniversary

The R-Ladies Melb Inc was excited to have Goknur Giner, co-founder of R-Ladies Melbourne, presenting about basics of RShiny during our third year anniversary event. Just to add a personal view on this, I started making my first RShiny app using my own data right after her super-clear talk on that day. We had an R-Ladies-themed cake with all the amazing members who attended on the day and enjoyed a fantastic view from the NOUS venue. Morever, as I shared the great joy of founding this group with her, the moments Goknur talked about her journey with R-Ladies Melb were particularly sentimental to me. Her appreciation for the support she received from us as a community after she became a mother indicated that there are many other aspects of how R-Ladies Melb can assist individuals. Her daughter Maya Su is 2.5 years old now and she has already been to two useR! conferences. As Goknur mentioned in her talk, special thanks to the R-Ladies community all around the world for creating opportunities for women.

The R-Ladies Melb third year annivesary with Goknur Giner

More advanced R

In 2019 we were able to organise 13 events covering workshops, seminars and networkings. Although we organised a workshop to teach the fundamentals of R (by Goknur Giner and Nikki Rubinstein) and a lunch Zoom event on the basic data visualisation in R (by Zhuowen (Tobey) Zhang), this year we focused more on the advanced topics; this was because the majority of our members were interested in advanced R topics, according to our 2019 start-of-the-year survey. Examples of these events were:

RMarkdown and publication-ready documents by Anna Quaglieri and Soroor Hediyeh Zadeh in Feb
Overview of Reproducible research, documentation, and cloud computing by Lavinia Gordon in May
Natural language processing from Ana Mamatelashvili in Jun
Package review system and rOpenSci from Melina Vidoni in Jul
Reproducibility using Containers in R by Saras Windecker in Sep

Some of the R-Ladies Melb Inc events

Organisers of R-Ladies Melb Inc

The R-Ladies Melb has always had a main organiser for every year. Although we were not much formally shaped in 2017, Goknur Giner did a great job for organising sponsorships and venues, so she was our informal main organiser at the time. In 2018, Anna Quaglieri was selected more formally by all of us agreeing in our committee meeting for her to be the main organiser. Finally in Feb 2019, it was my turn to do it by everyone’s agreement. The figure below shows the organisers of the R-Ladies Melb Inc in 2019 along with their roles. After calling for valounteers to be organisers of this group, Shazia, Sehrish, Shanmathi and Miriam joined the team in Jun 2019. In addition to all of us, we also have had occasional help from Stephanie Koo for a couple of events; unfortunately, she did not have much time to commit as an official organiser.

R-Ladies Melb Inc Committee Members and Organisers

Other contributions

Accelerated leadership program

While offering technical skills workshops with R-ladies is important, Marie also felt that there is a need to help women identify the individual factors that contribute to their participation, achievements and career progression. As such, she became involved in the Accelerated Leadership Program organised by Women & Leadership Australia in May 2019. In this program she conducted a survey that assessed self-professional worth and examined how to promote gender equality by identifying other individual factors that could contribute to women’s participation, achievement and progression. Based on the results of this survey and information from the literature, she started to organise coaching sessions with Kintsugi Coaching aimed at helping more women to identify the factors and limitations of their career progression and to empower them to achieve their professional goals. As a certified Organisational Coach from the IECL, she wants to make a difference for women in science which is to empower them by providing developmental opportunities for successful leadership among STEM professions and strategies to grow and thrive.

useR! 2019

Although useR! 2018 conference was in Brisbane and most of our organisers could attend and present at it, the useR! 2019 in July 2019 was held in Toulouse, France and therefore harder for the organisers to attend that. However, it was fantastic to see that a past (Roxane) and a present (Goknur) R-Ladies Melb organisers could still meet up at the useR! 2019.

The useR! 2019 R-Ladies Global with Goknur and Roxane

Winter school in mathematical and computational biology

Winter School in Mathematical and Computational Biology is a yearly event organised by the University of Queensland and is designed to show university students and postdocs how to use bioinformatics and computational methods to solve biological questions. In Jul 2019, I was invited to talk about how to generate dynamic reports in RStudio and also introduce R-Ladies and its mission. This winter school also included a panel discussion on the last day, and I experienced being on a panelist for the first time!

We all count: strengthening stats and maths through diversity

In December 2019 the the Statistical Society of Australia invited the R-Ladies Melbourne to be part of an awesome panel of women to dicuss how we can improve the Math and Stats workforce in Australia by increasing diversity. The discussion of this particular session was aimed at increasing women participation, and Anna Quaglieri represented us by giving a short talk about the history of the R-ladies and by showcasing the 2019 highlights of the R-Ladies Melbourne! The short talks were followed by an insighful panel discussion around ways to incraese women representation in both academia and industry and what are the main obtacles to reach geneder balance.

Some of the other contributions of R-Ladies Melb members

STEM Women Changmakers grant

Australian Academy of Science has made an online directory of Women who work in STEM in Australia, where women can share their profiles, and anyone can find them according to their experties and experiences. Late in 2019, Lavinia Gordon recommended that I should apply for the STEM Women Changemakers grants to attend the “Catalysing Gender Equity” event in Adelaide; that was when I opened a women in STEM profile, and applied for the grants. I am very excied to have received one of the STEM Women Changemakers grants that are awarded to 12 women across Asutralia. I am grateful to Lavinia for letting me know about this and to the Australian Academy of Science for selecting me as one of the STEM Women Changmakers! According to the record of Australian Academy of Science, there are > 2300 women who have joined STEM Women. I strongly encourage all women in STEM to open a profile and share all their contributions, so that their talent and expertise are accessible.

Sepideh Foroutan wins an STEM Women Changemakers grant

How things work in terms of roles and rules

To be an organiser of R-Ladies Melb, you do not need to be expert in R, use R every day, and spend a lot of time organising things, etc; you can be an R-Ladies organiser if you are passionate about R, supportive of diversity in the R community, keen to help out with event organisation and have a bit of spare time. If you would like to get involved, here you can find a brief description of labor within the organising committee based on my experience.

In addition to having formal roles defined by the incorporation (president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer), we also have our own internal roles. For each role, we have a main person responsible for that role as well as a secondary person that covers that responsibility in the absence of the main person. Alternatively, the two people can share the responsibility as suit them. For example, Nikki and Shazia are responsible for the R-Ladies Melb twitter account, but for the events that Nikki was not around, Shaiza was the person doing the live-tweeting. They also check the R-Ladies Melb twitter account in turn.

Not only we follow the rules of incorporation, but also we have always had our own internal rules which all members respect to. One of our internal rules, as we detailed before, is that there is one/two main organiser(s) for each event, who does not actually do all the things herself, but instead is responsible to follow up with different people responsible to do their tasks (venue booking, advertising, catering, etc). In this way, the responsibilities are split between all members across the year. We also defined new rules this year in terms of our presence/absence in the monthly organising committee meetings as well as in our monthly events. Based on this rule, if an organiser is absent in 3 consecutive meetings/events, she needs to be contacted by the president and checked if she is still inteersted to get involved.

If there are things that we are not sure about, we can always ask the other R-Ladies chapters on the slack channel, specifically, the R-Ladies Global. It is important to remember that all we do is voluntary and therefore there is no pressure to have so many events in a year; the more we can do, the more we enjoy supporting the under-represented people in the R community, which is a great cause and is truly rewarding.

If you think this is something that fits you and your schedule, please get in touch! The R-Ladies Melb always needs motivated and passionate organisers!

My personal remarks

I have been involved in the R-Ladies Melb chapter since the beginning, and for over three years now; two years as a co-organiser and last year as the president. During this time, I have learnt so much, not only about R and data analysis tools, but also about how to successfully organise events and how to share the work load as a team. I learnt so much about incorporations, found many new friends outside of academia, and expanded my network within academia.

It was a great but challenging experience to lead the team as the president. As a perfectionist, I always used to do everything myself, and so it was not easy to delegate work to people, but I am glad that I learnt this with help from other members, specifically, Marie and Goknur, whose encouragement and feedback gave me more confidence in my role as a leader. One thing that I used to do naturally though, was that I always ask the committee members’ opinions on matters as it gave me a feeling that everyone is happy with a decision.

It has not been just about R! This has been also about ourselves, our barriers and challenges. I believe the R-Ladies is a family where people offer support to each other! Sometimes this support is in the form of workshops or seminars, where people develop skills, which in turn can contribute to a more inclusive data science world, but other times, this support is in the form of friendship. I have experienced enormous amount of mental support from the members of R-Ladies Melb, particularly when I was hospitalised due to an accident early in 2019 and it was quite difficult to get back to my routine. I know other members in the team, such as Goknur as mentioned above, also benefited from the friendly and supportive environment in this family.

Based on all the great experience that I have had as a member of this community, I strongly encourage you to consider joining the group as a co-organiser. You can learn so much by doing so and see how rewarding it is! You will also be recognised for your contribution as we were, and of course it looks good on your CV! I am sure you will love being a part of this community, as we all do.

In the end, I would like to thank every one of the past and the present organisers of R-Ladies, all our great speakers who shared their knowledge with our community in order to get them started using/making tools or advance their skills. It is obvious that without the members in our local community we would not be able to continue, and without the support that we get from the larger community of R-Ladies around the world we could not develop over time. It has been always the members’ enthusiasm and the community’s support that encouraged us to continue. THANK YOU!!

Testimonial

We are very grateful to Lavinia Gordon and Alison Hill, two of our speakers in 2019, for their lovely testimonials. This is our great pleasure to have hosted them, and their positive comments about R-Ladies Melb chapter is a strong motivation for all of us!

“It was a delight and an honour to have an opportunity to present at an R-Ladies Melb event. R-Ladies Melb work hard to foster a welcoming community that encourages learning via social and collaborative sharing. Their focus is on supporting and promoting underrepresented genders, but they are inclusive in their participation. They are a positive force for good, and I hope that 2020 brings them bigger and better things.”

— Lavinia Gordon

“Giving a talk for RLadies Melbourne is one of the standout moments for me in my career at RStudio so far. Having been an RLadies organizer, I know that it takes more than good speakers and an engaged user base to run a successful chapter. It takes time and energy to be sure, but most importantly, it takes consistently delivering high-quality events so that you build trust within your community. RLadies Melbourne is a great model for how to run an RLadies chapter that fully supports the global mission of encouraging, inspiring, and empowering people of genders currently underrepresented in the R community.”

— Alison Hill

Find us

Finally, do not forget to follow the R-Ladies Melb Inc if you would like to be updated about us and our events; we do our best to record our events, and make all of our events’ materials available on Github.

Aknowledgements

I would like to thank Marie, Goknur, Anna, and Sehrish for their valuable feedback about this document. Also, thanks to Anna for her great reports last year, which were useful to produce this document. Finally, I would like to thank Ramyar Molania for his ongoing support for my R-Ladies activities!

R-Ladies Melbourne Inc 2019 highlights

Momeneh (Sepideh) Foroutan - 2019 President

February 2020