This page provides editorial commentary on a historical coordinating body. WIGSAT (Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training) is an editorial directory and is not affiliated with, nor a successor to, the Gender Advisory Board or any of its working groups. References are for editorial historical purposes only.
Editorial commentary on a historical coordinating mechanism
During the late 1990s and 2000s, the Gender Advisory Board (GAB) - an advisory body convened to support the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development - operated several coordinating mechanisms intended to bridge international research, intergovernmental policy, and field-level practice on gender equity in science and technology. The most active of these was an informal coordinating circle commonly referred to as the Global Working Group. This page provides a brief editorial history for readers who encounter a citation to that group in present-day literature.
The Working Group's membership drew from academic researchers, UN-system staff (notably from UNECA, UNESCO and UNDP), bilateral aid agencies, and a small number of NGOs working on gender and international science policy. Participants were drawn from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe; the geographic spread was a deliberate response to the perception that earlier policy conversations on gender and S&T had been dominated by voices from OECD countries.
Output took three principal forms. The first was a set of position papers prepared for submission into UNCSTD plenary sessions and related intergovernmental processes. The second was a series of meeting summaries circulated to a wider mailing list of researchers and policy professionals. The third was a small number of collaborative reference documents - typically short, focused on a single policy question such as the integration of gender into national science and technology indicators - intended for use by national science ministries and donor agencies.
Across these outputs, three recurring concerns are visible in the archived material: integrating gender analysis into national S&T indicators; ensuring that international technical-assistance programmes addressed gender equity as an operational priority rather than a compliance requirement; and creating channels by which women scientists and engineers from developing countries could be represented in global policy dialogues.
Present-day literature on gender, science and innovation policy occasionally cites Working Group documents either as primary-source evidence of the policy framing used in the late 1990s and 2000s, or as part of the documentary record on multi-stakeholder coordination mechanisms in research policy. Readers consulting those citations should refer to the archived documents themselves, preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.