Hi friends and welcome to the first End Sexism In Schools campaign update. It’s been just over 2 weeks since we launched the website and officially started recruiting volunteers to our crowdresearch project and what a two weeks it has been!
We’ve already passed 200 schools researched and had nearly 20 new volunteers sign up. We’re really thrilled with the interest the campaign has garnered so far and with the enthusiasm of our volunteer researchers.
Even though it’s early days, there’s one thing that has emerged already that we hadn’t expected. During our quality assurance process, it has come to our attention that there are a few instances where schools are teaching a text (usually a play) where the source material or original story was written by a woman, but the adaptation being studied was written by a man. This is an interesting quirk that we hadn’t anticipated when originally setting up the data collection form but we think it’s important to capture.
Having seen this crop up a few times, we’re now going to be actively checking for further instances, and collating this data manually. It will be visualised separately on our GRID live data page. As our data is updated in real time, but our QA/collation process will be carried out on a periodic basis, the figures in the data bar charts may occasionally change, as we reallocate data from ‘female novelist/playwright’ to ‘source material by a woman, adaptation by a man’.
In order to maintain the integrity of our data, we are keeping a record of all instances where these changes are made and will also be keeping an eye out for any occurrences of the reverse happening (i.e. source material by a man adapted by a woman). If you have any queries about it, please feel free to email us at endsexisminschools@gmail.com.
We’ll be sure to keep you up to date with any other interesting or unexpected trends that begin to arise but, in the mean time, make sure you’re following us on Twitter and don’t forget to sign up to get involved — you can support our crowdresearch in as little as 15-30 minutes from the comfort of your own home!
