Internet - To Women!

Galina Grishina

The Internet is confidently winning higher and higher popularity and gaining increasing influence on its users’ view of the world. The look of the Internet itself is, in turn, reflecting all conventional stereotypes of the public conscience, including the gender ones.

What can the Internet offer to women, then? In a few words, it is the same as most of the mass-media do – entertainment, gossip, information on shops, cooking, fashion, dating agencies… On closer view one can see that over 40 percent information is not meant specifically for women and is in no way connected with the theme "Woman – society". The web-pages and sites in Russian dedicated to the gender studies and education, women’s movement and feminism, have not for some reason joined in with Russian catalogs and search systems of the Internet.

Our organization – "East – West: Women’s Innovational Projects" – decided to improve the situation. With the help of the Russian network program of the "Open Society" Institute we developed and published the Internet resources catalog that we called "Internet – to Women!" The catalog contains information on women’s position in the society, their participation in decision making, the strategy and practice of women’s movement. Along with the printed version we also developed the electronic one which can be found on our site "Open Women Line" (OWL). The electronic version provides the possibilities of search, besides the users can add the information they possess to the catalog of the Internet resources.

The catalog is meant for women’s organizations, journalists, experts, politicians, researches, as well as for a wide audience. After selecting available information from the Internet both in Russian and in English, we classified it according to the 14 thematic sections: "Women’s Movement", "Women’s Rights – Human Rights", "Women’s and Gender Studies", "Politics", "Economy", "Religion", "Mass-media", "Social Issues", "The Problems of Violence", "Health", "Sexuality", "Education and Teaching", "Women’s Creativity, Culture and Art", "Grant-givers, Funds, Charity". The sections are constituted by sub-sections; besides they include blocks of general information. Though not all themes are covered in equal detail, the catalog reflects the whole specter of relationships between women and society. The most abundant information can be found in the sections considering the situation of women in the society, their rights, activities and achievements of Russian and foreign women’s organizations, politics, female and gender studies, and problems of violence. At the same time our catalog does not include the traditional "women’s" subjects typical for other Internet catalogs: shopping, cooking, marriage agencies, fashion and others.

The thematic sections of the catalog have the total of 911 references to the Internet web-sites. The references include the title and web-address of the site, a short summary of the information and its volume, language used by authors as well as some other helpful data.

The authors hope that the catalog "Internet – to women!" will be a useful guide for all those who are interested with the women’s thematic.

You are welcome to visit the web-site with the electronic version of the catalog: http://iw.owl.ru/ We will be grateful to you for any opinions and suggestions. Please send them to the address: info@owl.ru