R Ladies: The First Group in Istanbul for Women in Programming

R-Ladies İstanbul is a non-profit initiative that supports women in programming and aims to help them be more active in their STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) career. We interviewed Hazel Kavılı, Betül Güzel and Hande Bitrim from R-Ladies İstanbul.

What are R and R-Ladies?

R is a worldwide program of data analysis and visualization. It is a language that gets more functional each day thanks to a wide group of statisticians, social scientists, ecologists and journalists.   

(For further information: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01169.x)

R-Ladies is a non-profit initiative that supports anyone who define themselves as women to be more active in data science, statistics and programming. It is an organization with 119 local groups and almost 27 thousand members around the world.

R-Ladies İstanbul started its journey in September 2016. We hold workshops and discussions on different subjects every month. There were only 13 people in our first event but now we host at least 30 people in each event.

You give priority to women and LGBTI+ communities. Why is it important to you?

We defend equality and diversity in everything. We oppose to the idea that one is not be able to work on a specific field due to their identity. We try to improve conditions as much as we can. We want to support women, anyone who define themselves as women, by encouraging their efforts.

How can they reach you?

You can follow us via https://www.meetup.com/tr-TR/rladies-istanbul/ ) and https://twitter.com/RLadiesIstanbul. You can contact us via hazel@rladies.org or istanbul@rladies.org.