This page provides editorial profiles of researchers and institutional bodies active in gender and science-policy work between the 1980s and 2010s. WIGSAT (Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training) is an editorial directory and is not affiliated with, nor a successor to, any of the people, organizations, or initiatives profiled below. References are for editorial historical purposes only.
A short editorial reference to people and institutional bodies whose work shaped the international policy field on gender, science and technology between the 1980s and the 2010s.
Nancy Hafkin is an American researcher and development practitioner who spent much of her career on the intersection of gender, information and communication technologies, and international development policy. She is most closely associated with the Pan African Development Information System at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), which she directed for many years and which became a reference point for ICT-policy strategy across the African continent during the 1990s.
Later in her career, Hafkin became one of the leading published voices on the gender dimensions of ICTs in developing regions, contributing to and editing reference reports under the umbrella of UNIFEM (now UN Women), the Association for Progressive Communications, and the InfoDev program at the World Bank. She has been recognised by the Internet Society (induction into the Internet Hall of Fame) among other bodies for her work on internet access and gender equity. Editorial references to her contributions appear widely in the secondary literature on gender, science and technology policy.
The Gender Advisory Board was an international body convened in the mid-1990s to advise the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) on the integration of gender considerations into science and technology policy. It is best known for a three-volume reference series on gender and science and technology and for a long set of submissions to UNCSTD plenary sessions through the late 1990s and 2000s.
The GAB no longer operates as an active body in its original form. Its publications are referenced in present-day secondary literature and are preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The present WIGSAT directory has no organisational relationship to the Gender Advisory Board; this page references it only for the limited historical purpose of editorial commentary.
The Gender and Science and Technology Association (GASAT) organised an international research conference roughly every two years from 1981 (founded at Eindhoven) through the late 2000s. Its proceedings are widely cited in the secondary literature on gender and science education and are sometimes treated as foundational source material for that field. Conference papers appeared across approximately fourteen meetings and produced an early body of empirical work on classroom interactions, curriculum content, and pipeline trajectories. Editorial overviews of the conference series are available in the GASAT section of this site.
A non-governmental organisation operated wigsat.org between 1998 and the mid-2010s and produced a body of policy work on gender and international science-and-technology cooperation, including contributions to the Gender Equality in Knowledge Societies (GEKS) initiative. That organisation is no longer active. The present WIGSAT directory — Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training — is a separate later use of the same domain and has no organisational, legal, or operational continuity with the earlier non-governmental organisation. This page references the earlier organisation only for the limited historical purpose of profiling key figures in the field.