We are excited to announce that R-Ladies Global turns five this month! It’s been an incredible journey. Do you want to know how it all started? You can read about our history here. With this post we would like to celebrate our achievements and tell you why we are so proud of our amazing community! Little did we know five years ago that a community of only four chapters would inspire so many around the world.

We are very happy to provide you this blog article in different languages, English, French and Spanish. If you would like to know more about how to contribute to the R-Ladies Blog in general or would like to recommend anything, please reach out to us with an e-mail at christin@rladies.org. How it all started …? 🤔 R-Ladies Cotonou is a local chapter of R-Ladies Global located in Cotonou, Benin (West Africa).

This year has been and continues to be a challenging year for many, if not all, of us. We have needed to make some adjustments in our personal lives and as R-Ladies is a volunteer run organisation we also needed to make some changes in the work we do at R-Ladies Global. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, we have added new infrastructure for online meetups via Calendly, Zoom and a YouTube channel, along with guides and training for organizers.

As organizations committed to broadening diversity and inclusion in our community, we stand with #BlackLivesMatter and join those who demand justice for systemic oppression. Pervasive racism negatively impacts the participation of Black people in society. The current events in the USA echo what has happened and continues to happen to minoritised people across the world. We are aggregating resources and are taking deliberate actions to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous and People of Color in the R community now and moving forward.

Our chapters have cancelled in-person meetups due to the corona virus pandemic. However, we want our members to be able to stay connected and still share their latest R-related discoveries and journeys. To support our chapter organisers in moving their events online, we decided to provide them with video conferencing infrastructure. Our network has grown to over 160 chapters worldwide so we were wondering how many meeting rooms we would need.

To close the awesome R-Ladies 2019 year we made a video, if you haven’t seen it yet, here it is: Happy New Year to all #rladies and allies! 🎉🎉🎉 Video put together by @yabellini & @_lacion_ , voice @AlejaBellini 💜💜💜 pic.twitter.com/QRxuJxLugj — R-Ladies Global (@RLadiesGlobal) January 1, 2020 Did you like it? Do you want to know how we did it? Here we will give you all the details:

R-Ladies started out as a meetup group in San Francisco, when Gabriela de Queiroz founded the first chapter and organised the first event in 2012. Following this example, three further groups started out over the next three years. Shortly after the useR! conference in 2016, where Gabriela and other organisers met in person, the R-Ladies Global organisation was co-founded by several active community members. Since then, the number of R-Ladies chapters has grown massively and rapidly.

DataCamp’s CEO Jonathan Cornelissen sexually assaulted an employee by making “uninvited physical contact” in October 2017. This became public in April 2019, after which we released a statement on our blog. For a comprehensive account of events, please see this article by Davey Alba for BuzzFeed News published in May 2019. DataCamp commissioned a third-party review which has now been released. This blogpost is to add some clarification around references to R-Ladies made in that report.

This blog post is a slightly extended version of the official statement the R-Ladies Global organization made via Twitter, in a form that is easier to share. The views expressed here are the views of the R-Ladies Global Team signing at the end of this post and do not represent the R-Ladies community at large. Why we condemn DataCamp’s handling of sexual assault We are very disappointed by the way DataCamp handled the sexual assault of an employee by a C-level executive.

Every year on March 8th, the world celebrates International Women’s Day (IWD). Although this date has different ways of celebration, it has one point in common - the fight for gender equality. The previous year, in 2018, an enthusiast R-Ladies' group took the initiative for a massive project to tweet about all the profiles registered in the R-ladies directory, throughout 8th March 2018. In February this year, the year 2019, Yanina proposed to follow their lead and tweet about all the R-Ladies Chapters, throughout 8th March 2019.