For this year’s Women’s History Month the Electronic Resources & Systems (ERS) department draws attention to two databases, each of which focuses upon women yet with different types of holdings.
We hope this contrast/compare exercise provides insight into Gleeson’s e-resources as well as broadens appreciation for obstacles to equity women have faced and continue to face.
“Women In Tech – 81” by wocintechchat.com.
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women’s Issues
- Global in perspective and focused upon a broad array of topics relevant to our current era
- Searches will return results from credible academic sources
To give a sense of this database’s content, on the topic of “unequal pay” there’s an extensive 2017 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) report detailing how “49.6 per cent of working age women compared to 76 per cent of men are represented in the labour force globally” while the “gender pay gap is 23 percent” and “Women are over-represented among the 73 per cent of the world’s population that has limited or no social protection.”
There’s also a 2025 report: “Reproductive health literacy scale: a tool to measure the effectiveness of health literacy training” reviewing efficacy of health literacy-related “trainings and their possible impact” upon refugee women. It covers in detail the process of identifying the need for a tool to measure such impact and the process undertaken to develop an effective survey scale to assess the situation.
On the spunkier side, a search for “cyberfeminism” turns up the article “Pink Hair as a Cyberfeminist Symbol: Online Gender-Based Violence and the “PinkUp” Movement in China” which goes about “analyzing how symbols like pink hair can become powerful means of challenging traditional gender norms and promoting feminist solidarity in Chinese cyberspace” by highlighting, in part, the case of a recently hired young professor in China attacked over social media by those “questioning the authenticity of her degree and saying that her pink hair was inappropriate for the teaching profession.”
Women’s Magazine Archive
- Historical in nature, covering 19th and 20th century popular North American (U.S. and Canada) culture
- Results are scanned pages of originals including any photographs and other graphics
A search for unequal pay brings up Women’s Legal Rights, 1975: A Report from out Cosmopolitan magazine, delving into both then recent “legal changes – and the legal short-comings that still exist – in five areas that vitally effect every woman’s life.”
There are more recent articles as well, such as What’s your health IQ?: Protecting Your Health from a 2001 issue of Ladies Home Journal.
And a 1995 interview with author bell hooks entitled “Sister Knowledge” from Essence magazine: “For me, feminism is not a movement of women against men. It’s a way of thinking that allows all of us to examine the harmful role sexism plays in our personal lives and public world and to figure our what we can do to change this.”
Feminist Bookstore News, Volume 21, Issue 3 Fall, 1998 courtesy of Independent Voices
Keep in mind as well that abundant resources relating to women can be found in any one of our singular disciplinary databases such as Political Science Complete (politics), Humanities Source (humanities), Education Source (education), SocINDEX with Full Text (sociology), and Literary Reference Plus (literature).
Featured image: cropped cover of WOMANSPIRIT, Volume 10, Issue 37, Fall Equinox 1983, courtesy of Independent Voices.