Women in R

Last week I gave one of the keynote addresses at R/Finance 2018 in Chicago. I considered it an honor and a pleasure to be there, both because of the stimulating intellectual exchange and the fine level of camaraderie and hospitality that prevailed. I mentioned at the start of my talk that the success of this conference, now in its tenth year, epitomized the wonderful success enjoyed nowadays by the R language.

On the first day of the conference, one of the session chairs announced that a complaint had been made by the group R-Ladies, concerning the fact that all of the talks were given by men. The chair apologized for that, and promised efforts to remedy the situation in the future. Then on the second day, room was made in the schedule for two young women from R-Ladies to make a presentation. (There also was a research paper presented by a woman; I don’t know whether this was a last-minute change.)

I have been interested in status-of-women issues for a long time, and I spoke briefly with one of the R-Ladies women, Angela Li, after the session. I suggested that she read a blog post I had written that raised some troubling related issues.

But I didn’t give the matter much further thought until Tuesday of this week, when a friend asked me about the “highly eventful” conference. That comment initially baffled me, but it turned out that he was referring to the R-Ladies controversy, which he had been following in the “tweetstorm” on the issue in #rfinance2018 . Not being a regular Twitter user, I had been unaware of this.

Again, issues of gender inequity (however defined) have been a serious, proactive concern of mine over the years. I have been quite active in championing the cases of talented female applicants for faculty positions at my university, for instance. Of my five current research students, four are women. In fact, one of them, Robin Yancey, is a coauthor with me of the partools package that played a prominent role in my talk at this conference.

That said, I must also say that those tweets criticizing the conference organizers were harsh and unfair. As that member of the program committee pointed out, other than keynote speakers, the program is comprised of papers submitted for consideration by potential authors. Many readers of those tweets will think that the program committee is prejudiced against women, which I really doubt is the case.

Indeed, my experience on journal editorial boards shows me that in many cases, gender is unknown, as it is not obvious from authors’ names on a paper. The notion that the committee ignored any and all submissions by women just doesn’t hold water.

So, apparently there was no error of commission here, but some may feel an error of omission did occur. Arguably any conference should make more proactive efforts to encourage female potential authors to submit papers for consideration in the program. Many conferences have invited talks, for instance, and R/Finance may wish to consider this.

However, there is, as is often the case, an issue of breadth of the pool. Granted, things like applicant pools are often used as excuses by, for example, employers for significant gender imbalances in their workforces. But as far as I know, the current state of affairs is:

• The vast majority of creators (i.e. ‘cre’ status) of R packages in CRAN etc. are men.
• The vast majority of books involving R are men.
• The vast majority of research papers related to R are men.

It is these activities that lead to giving conferenc talks, and groups like R-Ladies should promote more female participation in them. We all know some outstanding women in those activities, but to truly solve the problem, many more women need to get involved.