The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ratified 17 goals as a

global blueprint towards “economic, social and environmental sustainability” of all nations. It includes "Gender Equality” (Sustainable Development Goal 5) that seeks to empower women and girls by eliminating discrimination and providing equal opportunities for their fuller participation in all aspects of life. This case study provides an exploratory assessment of web-based information for women in Alabama’s public libraries located in the “American South” and its Appalachian region. Both have experienced ostracization and stereotyping in popular culture owing to political and religious conservativeness, Civil Rights struggles, gender prejudice, and hostile conditions towards women/minorities. This exploratory website content analysis identifies seven examples of information offerings categorized into three groupings: (1) information sources (collections, resources); (2) information policy and planning (assigned role, strategic representation); (3) connections (internal, external, news and events). It develops a taxonomic framework with representative examples that challenge the regional stereotype in its images of solely deficit marginalization. The discussion provides new directions and potential opportunities to build collaborations of sharing within Alabama’s public libraries and beyond to better address women’s concerns and gender inequities in their local and regional communities.

Sexual harassment is an invisible problem that has been difficult to combat because victims are often reluctant to report. However, within the past years, the sheer volume of women who have spoken up about sexual harassment has brought the issue to the forefront. This change has been largely driven, in part, by Internet and social media technologies. Given the large size of data posted on these online technologies, it is impossible to manually analyze and organize it; therefore, there is a need to utilize data and text mining methods. In order to help the fight against sexual harassment, this study proposes a predictive framework to collect more than 14,000 sexual harassment reports on the everyday sexism project (ESP) website and identify the space (location) in the reports. Our framework achieves a 85.33% accuracy for seven space classes including workplace, public space, home, public transport, school, university, and media. This paper also enriches experiments by merging similar classes (e.g., school and university) and applies a feature selection method to reduce the number of features for efficiency and effectiveness purposes. This enrichment process offers promising results for different sets of classes and features, ranging from 86% - 93% accuracy.

Gender difference is a widespread problem existing in academia and industries; women have been long suffered from lower-status, underrepresentation, differential treatment, and other difficulties. Studies of some occupations showed that neutral names could help make up for that inferior position. Using the publication data of WoS from 2009 to 2015, this paper analyzed citations within three years after publication, to investigate whether a neutral name has an impact on the research impact of a scientist. The findings show that: (1) papers were cited significantly more when the first author's names are more neutral; (2) the effect of single author's name neutralization degree on citation in each field showed no significant difference; and (3) the more gender-specific the authors' names are, the fewer citations the papers received, in the fields of "Clinical, Pre-Clinical & Health", "Engineering & Technology", "Life Sciences" and "Physical Sciences".

This paper reports preliminary qualitative findings from a survey of public library staff who work at libraries that have and have not hosted drag queen storytimes (DQS), a popular but contested children’s program. Three constructs—values, risks, and power—are developed to describe how individual, library, and institutional forces combine to determine whether DQS occur. Findings contribute to limited scholarly work on DQS by including locations that have not hosted DQS and by engaging critically with how institutional forces shape library staffs’ decision-making around DQS. It is critical to understand factors contributing to this decision-making to inform contextually appropriate strategies for encouraging dialogue about DQS as well as LGBTQ+ visibility and justice in children’s programming. Moreover, DQS constitute a salient context through which to critically explore broader issues of power and inclusion in public libraries.