History

Gabriela de Queiroz founded R-Ladies on October 1, 2012. She wanted to give back to the community after going to several meetups and learning a lot for free. The first meetup was held in San Francisco, California (United States). In the following years, two more R-Ladies chapters started around the globe: Twin Cities and Taipei. R-Ladies London was the fourth chapter, which launched in March 2016. Although each chapter started working independently, the need for high-level coordination and support became evident at useR! 2016 where the San Francisco and London chapters met. After some initial brainstorming during the useR! 2016 conference, 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, and the grant was awarded in September 2016. Since then R-Ladies has grown to 200+ chapters across 60+ countries with 100,000+ members, 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.