The Gender Equality and Knowledge Society Scorecard

An overview of the framework that quietly reshaped how international policymakers measure women's participation in science, technology, and innovation — what it includes, how it scores, and what its national scorecards revealed about the countries it studied.

What the framework is and why it was built

Before the Gender Equality and Knowledge Society framework — commonly abbreviated GEKS — most international comparisons of women's participation in science and technology relied on a thin set of indicators: women's share of researchers, women's share of STEM degrees, and women's labour-force participation. These three numbers do tell a story, but the story they tell is partial. A country can have a high share of women earning STEM degrees and still have women systematically excluded from the institutions where R&D money actually flows. Conversely, a country can show a low share of women researchers and still be doing more to grow that pipeline than its higher-scoring neighbours.

The GEKS framework was developed to widen the lens. Rather than treating "women in science" as a single indicator, it asked: what are the structural prerequisites for women to participate in a knowledge economy at all? And then it built indicators for each prerequisite. The result was an instrument that policymakers, academic researchers, and program designers could use to diagnose where a country's gender-and-knowledge-economy gaps actually sit — which is rarely where the headline numbers suggest.

The six measurement pillars

GEKS is organized around six measurement areas, each combining multiple sub-indicators drawn from national statistical sources, UN agency datasets, OECD reports, and the World Bank. Each pillar contributes to an overall score, but the pillar-level breakdown is where the framework's analytic value sits.

How the scoring works

Within each pillar, sub-indicators are normalized to a 0–1 scale, then aggregated. A country's pillar score is the weighted mean of its sub-indicators within that pillar, and the overall GEKS score is a weighted aggregate across pillars. Weights were derived through expert consultation rather than purely statistical methods — a deliberate methodological choice, since the framework's purpose was to surface gaps that policy can act on, not to produce a single ranking optimized for predictive validity.

The scoring approach has two consequences worth noting. First, a high overall score can mask serious gaps in one pillar — a country with strong health and education scores can still be performing badly on S&T policy infrastructure. Second, the framework rewards countries that invest in the pillar most directly under government control (S&T enabling policies), even when broader social indicators lag. This is intentional: GEKS is a diagnostic for policymakers, not a moral ranking.

What the national scorecards revealed

The framework was applied to produce national scorecards for several countries including India, the Republic of Korea, South Africa, and others. The headline finding across these scorecards was consistent: countries that score well on the social and economic pillars do not automatically score well on the S&T-specific pillars. Building broad gender equity is necessary but not sufficient for women's participation in knowledge economies. Specific policy infrastructure — funding instruments, mentorship programs, institutional accountability — does separate work.

India

The Indian scorecard revealed strong tertiary STEM enrollment but a sharp drop-off in research employment and senior leadership. The K–12 pipeline was building candidate pool; the labour-market and research-institution side was failing to absorb it. This pattern has subsequently shaped programs like INSPIRE and the more recent Vigyan Jyoti initiative. Read more →

Republic of Korea

The Korean scorecard showed high educational attainment and ICT access but persistent labour-force gaps and very low representation in senior research roles. This finding contributed to the policy environment in which WISET (Women in Science, Engineering and Technology) was established as a coordinating body. Read more →

South Africa

The South African summary highlighted strong policy infrastructure (the country has long had explicit gender-and-STEM frameworks in its national R&D strategy) but execution gaps related to broader socioeconomic conditions and the legacy of apartheid-era educational stratification. Read more →

How the framework influenced the field

GEKS was not the first attempt to measure women's participation in knowledge economies, and it is not the only such framework in active use today. The European Commission's She Figures, UNESCO's STEM and Gender Advancement (SAGA) toolkit, and the OECD's gender indicators all measure overlapping territory. What GEKS contributed was a relatively early and well-articulated multi-pillar approach, and the production of country-specific applications that ministries could use directly.

Subsequent frameworks have refined the methodology — SAGA, in particular, provides more granular guidance for countries with weaker statistical infrastructure — but GEKS remains widely cited in the methodological literature and the national scorecards continue to be referenced in policy papers and graduate dissertations. For a girl or young woman researching what "STEM policy" actually consists of as a career, frameworks like GEKS are the working artifacts of the field.

Why this matters for the programs in our directory

Every scholarship, summer camp, and graduate fellowship listed elsewhere on WIGSAT is in one of two relationships with frameworks like GEKS. Either the program was designed in response to gaps a framework like this surfaced — which is the case for many national-level programs in India, Korea, and South Africa — or the program operates without any explicit reference to such measurement, in which case it's worth asking whether it's designed against any specific structural problem at all.

For students applying to programs: this isn't your job to evaluate. But for parents, mentors, and program funders trying to assess where to direct resources, frameworks like GEKS are the closest thing the field has to a diagnostic instrument. They don't tell you which program to support. They do tell you what kind of gap you're trying to close.