Status and Accomplishments of Women
A United Nations overview of the world’s women suggests that anecdote and misperception abound largely because high quality information has been lacking. Growing awareness of women’s true circumstances has greatly increased the demand for better data. Accurate and complete information leads to better understanding and ultimately better policies designed to improve the conditions in which women live.
The lack of quality information on physical and cultural circumstances surrounding women’s lives and their contributions begs researchers to acquire important data on women, and using technological advances ensure that these data have wide accessibility and dissemination. Hence, the development of the third area of programmatic research in the Women’s Research Institute is designed to explore the use of technologies to document and make available information regarding the status of women and their accomplishments. In turn, these data collections will provide a foundation for the creation of research questions and facilitate designs that can examine multiple variables and contexts over multiple locations and points in time. This will enable the university community and the broader international scientific community opportunities to work with many holdings.
Selected Data Sets Within the Institute
The nature of the Institute’s involvement in the creation of a repository of data on women varies. Within the Institute, the first two areas of programmatic research have both accumulated small but exceptional data sets that will be made available for further analysis by other scholars.
Peaceful and Aggressive Behavior. This data set includes precise gender-blind measures of prosocial and antisocial movements and verbalizations of children 3 years of age in various gender controlled dyads of strangers and acquaintances. In addition, multiple indices of peaceful and aggressive behavior in children 6 to 11 have been obtained in hypothetical situations in simulated behavior in five types of conflict scenarios, in projective techniques eliciting emotions regarding perpetrators and victims, in self-assessments, interviews, and in ratings by adults. Data from multiple cultures and on adults as they relate to peace and violence are also available as well as coding techniques and batteries of instruments specifically created to assess twelve levels of the three-dimensional model of peaceful and violent behavior.
The Women of Ouelessebougou. Ten years of data on the conditions of daily life for the women of Ouelessebougou are also available. These data have been obtained from field observations, focus groups of families and organizations, tribal councils, personal interviews, photographs, and film footage. The participation of these women in multiple projects intended to provide educational, health, economic, and nutritional advantages has also been described and documented as well as gender related traditions and social customs.
Selected Faculty Research Projects on the Status and Accomplishments of Women
Furthermore, the Women’s Research Institute has encouraged and contributed to several much larger faculty research projects of this nature.
Sophie: A Digital Library of German-Language Women’s Works 1450-1922. This project is headed by Dr. Michelle S. James with the involvement of many faculty and students. The Sophie Internet Library provides a literature page with over 700 volumes of early texts readily accessible in modern print, including out-of-print, out-of-copyright novels and shorter fiction works, autobiographies, letters, journals and travel journals, works dealing with women’s lives and education during this period, as well as some large bibliographic/biographical reference works. A music page makes available a growing selection of previously unavailable music by early German-speaking women composers, including both the scores themselves and recordings of many of the pieces. Additional pages will include women in journalism, stage, screen, and colonial travel literature, as well as in texts reflecting the experiences of German women abroad and in colonies. Finally, this project includes the Sophie Journal, a peer-reviewed on-line journal which publishes works by interested scholars, providing a repository of information concerning the lives and works of early German-language women.
The Guide to the Women’s Manuscript Collection. This project is headed by Connie Lamb, MA, with John Murphy, MLS, and provides greater understanding of and access to primary documents related to women which are housed in the L. Tom Perry Collections of the Brigham Young University Library. These collections focus on Mormon and Western American women. The website includes summaries of some women’s manuscripts, bibliographical data, the manuscript genre, a short biography of the women, and an abstract description of the collection content. Materials include originals and/or transcripts of diaries, journals, biographies, autobiographies, papers, files, correspondence, and oral interviews of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Women’s Collection exists to help document the lives, roles, and accomplishments of women, both prominent and the seemingly obscure.
The WomanStats Project. This project is headed by Valerie Hudson, PhD, with Mary Caprioli, PhD, Rose McDermott, PhD, Chad Emmett, PhD, and Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, PhD. As many as 10 to 15 student research assistants are also involved in this project at any given time. The WomanStats Database is the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world, with over 90,000 data points on over 260 variables. It includes quantitative as well as qualitative data, such as laws, practices, customs and actual experiences as recounted by women, each linked to a full bibliographic source. All sources credentialed to speak about the situation of women in a country are included: national data, independent reports, and interviews with country experts, even if they are contradictory. A number of scales on different variables have been created as well as maps of the world based on those scales. The response to this database has been extraordinary, from the interest of the United Nations to the thousands who have already visited the website.
Because these projects are collections of data available for all scholars to use, it is impossible to know the number of scholarly works resulting from access to these datasets. However, as an example of the types of publications that can come from analyses of these data, the WomanStats project, which has only been online since July 23, 2007, has already made possible publications and presentations by the principal investigators.