Coded in Beijing: R-ladies and Ladies Who Tech, Spark a New Chapter for Data Scientists and Enthusiasts

The purple, with hints of red, orange and yellow chart on the event flyer, highlights aesthetics and visually appealing qualities of the R coding language. From the title, ‘Telling Stories with Data: Make a Data Visualization in R,’ one could tell this was going to be a riveting 2-hour coding introduction. “R is a programming language that’s really popular among data scientists and its used a lot for different statistical programming methods and machine learning as well as data visualization,” Clara, facilitator and one of the organizers of the first ever R-language workshop, explains. “Simply put, R-language allows you to write code by automating the process where you drag and drop from an excel sheet, usually a tedious process or for interesting analysis for different industries like finance, fashion and e-commerce, so it’s a way to make your job less boring with less excel.”

The organizing team – Ladies Who Tech, R-ladies, Innoway, Startup Grind and Akkadu – in itself is a clear representation of the innovative and revolutionary community of young tech professionals in the Beijing. Miatta Momoh, co-founder of Kente and Silk, an organization that challenges the status quo of China-Africa relations. Betty Zhao, Co-founder of Akkadu, a real-time event translation platform. Michelle Kan, Yenching scholar at Peking University, founder of Yenching Entrepreneurship Association. Kaha Gogiashvili, StartupGrind representative and International Business Development Supervisor at Innoway, Beijing’s key startup cluster. Nina Rong, Community Manager at Generalized Autonomy Aviation System, the fastest growing open-source autonomous drone and flying car software. Facilitator of the day, Clara Wang,a a data scientist with a commendable portfolio in data analysis using R, Python and SQL in politics, healthcare, non-profits and data privacy.

R- Ladies is a worldwide organization aimed at promoting gender diversity in the R-community by building a collaborative network of R-leaders, mentors, learners, developers and enthusiasts. Founded by Gabriela de Queiroz, a former IBM manager, with the sole aim of developing R-language skills, its mission is slowly coming to fruition with over 165 chapters in 47 countries and 50, 000 members, according to Ladies Who Tech. Now R-ladies is an organization that promotes gender diversity in the R community and a platform for data scientists and enthusiast’s alike, to code, share, inspire and support each other.

The movement’s most recent Chapter, R-ladies Beijing, was officially launched onNovember 23 at the TECOM conference, Beijing. The merging of these two vibrant and tech savvy teams lead to the first ever workshop that was a success. It began at approximately 3.00pm on December 21 with an eager audience equipped with their laptops in hand, ready to code. The environment was warm, despite the negative degrees in the city, titillating with knowledge from its technologically diverse audience brought together to advance their R skills completely free of charge.

The meet-up came to an end a few minutes past 5 with new connections fostered, and an agenda established for the R-community in Beijing.

“The goal of R- ladies as a global organization is to encourage more women to learn R because I think there tends to a gender biased against women learning different technical skills and creating a safe open environment for people to ask questions and learn in a comfortable way where they don’t feel judged. That’s the way to bridge the gender gap,” noted Clara.

Miatta also chimed in to share her thoughts: “We are very grateful to support R-ladies in the initiative they do, we also have fantastic support from Innoway and Startup grind and it’s just making these spaces available and making it inclusive, these solutions are available, this technology is available, come and try it! And also to spotlight people that are already doing it such as Clara and to show people that there are women in STEM doing great things.”