Research shows that works of female scholars are less likely to be referred to than publications written by male authors (see e.g. on gender gap citations
here). Is this the case in the field of consumer law studies, as well? These questions were raised in a conversation of my
colleagues: Prof Vanessa Mak (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands) and Dr Christine Riefa (Brunel University, UK). They decided to organise an online meeting with a few other female scholars working in the field of European consumer law to discuss whether we could see any potential gender gaps, as well as brainstorm ideas on how to address them. This led to the beginning of the Consumer Law Female Collective this summer.
One of the ideas coming from the meeting was to create a database for female (at least co-)written scholarship and share it publicly. This should raise the awareness of female scholarship in this field, hopefully increasing the amount of citations to this body of work. I found some time over the past few weeks to set it up on
Zotero, as it allows for an easy way to share it publicly. The database is open, which means all our readers can have access to it (although registration with Zotero will be necessary to do so). You may (and we hope you will) share this database with your students, colleagues, co-workers and anyone interested. We hope that this will help to diversify the curriculum for many consumer law classes, too.
We have introduced a detailed structure, hopefully allowing for an easy overview of sources, but the search function of the Zotero app facilitates an easy access, too. At the moment, we have over 100 sources in the database and many different sub-collections, but this is just the beginning. Therefore, dear readers, please feel free to send us suggestions what sources should further be added, what collections (sub-collections) you are still missing, etc. Our email address is: conlaw.fc[at]gmail.com When you are sending us your suggestions, please do so by giving us links to the publisher's websites for any journal articles, book chapters or books, as this facilitates adding these sources to Zotero. The main collections contain sources published in the English language but we are not opposed to the idea of creating sub-collections to sources written in other languages. The database is focused on European consumer law. With time we may, however, want to add sub-collections on other consumer legal systems.
We have now seven registered members of the Zotero Consumer Law Female Collective database group, with rights to add/edit the database, these are: Dr Andrea Fejos (University of Essex, UK), Dr Lorna Gillies (University of Strathclyde Glasgow, UK), Dr Joasia Luzak (University of Exeter, UK), Prof Vanessa Mak (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands), Dr Kristin Nemeth (Universität Innsbruck, Austria), Prof Charlotte Pavillon (University of Groningen, the Netherlands), Dr Christine Riefa (Brunel University, UK). If you were interested in having the rights to edit the database, please let us know, as we may want to add a few members to the editorial group.
