The WomanStats Project (www.womanstats.org/) began in 2001 with the aim of investigating the link between the security and behaviour of states and the situation and security of women. Their goal was the develop the most comprehensive database on women in the world, and I believe they have succeeded with 170,000 data points, 350 variables for 175 nations, enabling the user to find women’s physical, economic, legal, family, maternity security and their security within the family and their voice. How does it work? Well, it is clunky, but it works very well to reveal important information through an amazing job of indexing a vast amount of documents that are continually updated through the generous dedication of 12 undergraduate research assistants, 7 graduate research assistants, 13 principal investigators and over 120 former student assistants.
The easiest way to use the project is to open up the code in another browser. Then coming back to the website, search. Using the columns to choose a country and the rows to choose a variable, it is possible to retrieve some very finely granulated data. There is a video that usefully explains the searching procedures. For example (after you create a login), start by setting the parameters [year, sort order, source type (journal article, expert interview, in-country non-governmental organisation and much more) and a parameter called generalisability (more or less generalisable)]. Now, select a variable from the codebook and up to three countries (initially, add more later). I will search for: Holding Legal Office –code LBHO, government positions (GP) and GEM, Government Empowerment Measure, for Albania. What is retrieved, then, is a series of documents easily linked to. First there is a The Global Gender Gap Report 2014, a State of the World’s Mothers 2014 report, a United Nations Report and more. The necessary data is often accompanied by rich contextual narrative. In one example, a basic document about women’s legal status in Albania is in a document that points to the need for increased family violence surveillance, overview of the courts in regards to women’s issues and concerns regarding the lack of counselling and legal services for women belonging to ethnic and linguistic minorities and women living in rural areas, particularly, because it pertains to sexual harassment in the workplace. It is easy to redo the search, changing the country or after consulting the codebook, changing the topic.
One of the features that I used extensively in a recent project is the RSS feed. I simply went to the RSS directory and chose some countries I was working on and every day, new documents showed up in my inbox. Some countries are covered more richly than others. I received many new reports almost daily about Armenia, fewer about Myanmar. This feature, however, is very useful if the user wants to keep an eye out for an unfolding story for women in a particular country or a particular issue, such as trafficking.
If I could only introduce gender and women’s studies students to one international source, this would be it. I strongly recommend that librarians promote its use in order that students can better understand the complex story of women around the globe. Assigning the WomanStats Blog for weekly reading would be an excellent way to give students an eye-opening window to the world.
