Addressing Inequalities

Addressing inequalities is core to the history and culture of Glasgow Women’s Library. It is expressed in our approaches to working, and our commitment to improving access to our spaces and resources.

In 1991 we launched with the intention of addressing the lack of representation of women in Scotland’s cultural landscape, particularly for women who face further intersectional barriers. Throughout our history we have continually sought to challenge the ways that discrimination prevents women’s voices, work and lives from being fully included in culture and society, and specifically in libraries, archives, galleries and museums.

Staff, volunteers and Board have a shared and ongoing commitment to better understand and respond to the ways that inequality impacts our visitors and users, especially those who museums have traditionally found ‘easy to ignore’. We address inequalities in a fully integrated, holistic way – for example our approaches to tackling the systemic discrimination to be found in the museums sector can be found in our Equality in Progress report. We are working towards achieving the inclusive aims expressed in our Strategic and EDI Plans.

All aspects of our work are informed by reflective practice, community involvement, feminist intersectional working and leadership. We are constructively critical of, and actively challenge, the ways that sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, the hostile environment for refugees and asylum seekers and other discriminatory systems detrimentally affect the lives of women and non-binary people and our organisation.

Equality in Progress

In GWL’s work with diverse communities we have learnt about the spectrum of ways that structural, institutional and attitudinal inequalities impact women. Equality in Progress provides a blueprint for equalities-led transformation in the museum sector, using a feminist analysis of inequality to support the wider sector to enact sustainable change.