History

R-Ladies was founded by Gabriela de Queiroz. She wanted to do something to give back to the R learning community after going to several meetups and learning a lot for free. The first meetup took place in San Francisco, California (United States) on October 1, 2012.

In the following years two more R-Ladies chapters launched independently around the world : Twin Cities, USA and Taipei. R-Ladies London launched in March 2016. Although each chapter started working independently,all this changed at useR! 2016, when the organisers of the global R-ladies chapters met in person for the first time.

The R-ladies meeting at useR! realised the importance of a global R-ladies to support local chapters and help new R-ladies chapters form anywhere in the world. Gabriela de Queiroz and Erin LeDell from R-Ladies San Francisco and Chiin-Rui Tan, Alice Daish, Hannah Frick, Rachel Kirkham and Claudia Vitolo from R-Ladies London as well as Heather Turner teamed up to apply for an R-Consortium grant to support and encourage the global expansion of the R-Ladies organisation.

R-Ladies Global was born at useR 2016 and the grant was susequently awarded in September 2016. Since then, R-Ladies has grown to 63 chapters and over 13000 members. We have chapters across every continent, and many of the world’s major cities. We recently launched R-Ladies remote for R-Ladies who don’t currently live somewhere large enough for a chapter, or our restricted from attending meetups due to family concerns.

Thanks to our amazing organisers and R-Ladies who helped build and maintain our official website (rladies.org), engage with the larger community via social media - (@RLadiesGlobal) and help each-other every day in millions of different ways.