Workshops for Women and Girls

R Foundation taskforce on women and other under-represented groups.

Overview

Thanks to generous funding from the R Consortium, Forwards is pleased to offer the following workshops to support the development of coding skills and increase the participation of women in the R community:

  • Workshops for women are designed for women with some R coding experience who wish to learn more about package development, thereby addressing the skills gap that exists within the R community. As of 2016, an analysis of CRAN package maintainers estimated that fewer than 15% were women, and a useR! participant survey found that women were less likely than men to have experience contributing to or writing packages. Workshop participants learn to make code into an R package, do collaborative coding with GitHub, write a vignette or an article, build a package web page, and submit a package to CRAN. Participants can bring their own code that they wish to develop into a package or work with a Forwards example.

  • Workshops for high school girls serve as an introduction to coding in R and are designed for students interested in STEM, coding, and data analysis. Participants learn about plotting data, web scraping, and the development of Shiny apps. A selection of topics related to contemporary current affairs are used, and where possible, incorporate data specific to the workshop’s geographic location.

Past Workshops

Code of Conduct

Workshop instructors and participants agree to adhere to the R Consortium and R Community Code of Conduct.

Computing Information

If possible, please install the most recent versions of the following software on your laptop prior to the workshop:

If you have trouble, there will be technical support prior to the start of the workshop (arrive 30 minutes early).

Workshop Materials

Workshop materials are available on GitHub under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 license.