Oldham Paper — GAB Archive
Geoffrey Oldham was one of the founding figures of science policy as a discipline, associated with the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada. Over a career spanning several decades, he was instrumental in building the institutions that connected science and technology analysis to development policy globally.
This paper, hosted in the WIGSAT and Gender Advisory Board archive, represents Oldham's engagement with gender equity as a dimension of science and technology policy for development. It situates the GAB's gender work within the broader history of S&T for development as a field, addressing both the structural exclusion of women from S&T institutions and the consequences of that exclusion for the quality and relevance of research produced by those institutions.
The paper draws on Oldham's long experience with national science systems in developing countries, bringing a science policy systems perspective to the gender question that complemented the sociological and development economics approaches that dominated the GAB's other publications.
It is an important document for understanding how gender equity arguments were translated from the women's movement into the language of science policy and development effectiveness during the 1990s — the period when that translation became a practical necessity for advocates seeking to influence intergovernmental frameworks.